House EP / Ulisses Morato de Andrade

Architects: Ulisses Morato de Andrade
Location: Nova Lima, MG, Brazil
Project area: 213 sqm
Project year: 2003 – 2004
Photographs: Daniel Mansur

This construction occupies the top of a hillside and is projected over an immense valley framed with a chain of mountains, a predominant relief in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. In the surroundings of Nova Lima – MG, where the construction was erected, a considerable part of the houses are influenced by the language of Portuguese colonial architecture and uses manual techniques of construction.

The house was projected for a young executive with a bold entrepreneur profile. Our architectonic proposal created a contemporaneous language tuned to the owner’s profile and, at the same time, it incorporated the constructive techniques and materials available in the region. With this conceptual arrangement we were able to articulate constructive tradition to contemporaneous design and open space to a new approach of architectonic solution for local houses.

ground floor plan

The place chosen for the house was determined by the generous native landscape in the surroundings. In this context, space definition privileged the possibilities of relationship of house users with the exuberant natural landscape. As for the relation House x Nature, we decided for the contrast, i.e., the radicalization of a geometric and rational design in opposition to natural organic shapes. Therefore, the “natural order” and “cultural order” are mutually distinguished and valued.

The house was built in a land with three distinct levels. This arrangement lead to a better use of declivity and, at the same time, great plasticity to architectonic elements. Pure volumes receive interference from inclined columns, from discontinuous covering planes and from the red wall that crosses the house. The reference to the Brazilian modernist architecture is maintained and nevertheless unconstructed and reorganized.