Marcio Kogan and mk27 complete Casa Azul

Casa Azul provides sensitive modern day architecture to the Atlantic Forest

Casa Azul may well be the latest in a extensive line of household masterpieces by Marcio Kogan and his associates at Studio MK27, but it is special between its distinguished cohort for its website, a scarce parcel inside the safeguarded Atlantic Forest that has formed this project in each and every way. Positioned in Guarujá, Brazil, in the point out of São Paulo, with the beautiful Iporanga Beach front and Atlantic Ocean a mere 500m away, Casa Azul is a study in sustainable architecture and improvement and contemporary Brazilian architecture.

Understandably, the regional municipality was stringent about its building. It took virtually two many years to secure the demanded environmental agency approvals, which mandated a 2m-extensive protecting bubble past the footprint of the residence to protect the forest from developing action. Officers were on website daily to examine the effects of the venture on the surrounding flora, but Kogan, Diana Radomysler (he co-heads the studio with her, Renata Furlanetto, Suzana Glogowski and Mariana Simas) and their co-designer Samanta Cafardo ended up additional than pleased to comply with strict environmental oversight, and to go even even further. 

The ground ground deck characteristics a swimming pool and loads of shade 

‘Our goal was to truly integrate the residence into the surrounding forest,’ says Cafardo. ‘When you search at this astounding place, it’s difficult to not want to protect it.’ The workforce was prosperous in their endeavours, wholly preserving the present landscape throughout the process, and eventually aiming to qualify for the optimum developing credential certification from Brazil’s Inexperienced Creating Council (GBC Brasil). They have now applied for it and count on the benefits afterwards this year. In the same spirit, the wood made use of to make the handful of furniture parts that were being personalized developed by the team was sourced from responsibly-managed forests and certified by Brazil’s Forest Stewardship Council.

Casa Azul’s fairly little building footprint of 350 sq m compelled Studio MK27 to rethink its very long-held beliefs about household scale. The practice’s projects are normally extensive, minimal-slung constructions that sit in classy humility on the landscape, normally deferring to mother nature. Below, that deference and the aforementioned environmental limitations intended heading a bit additional vertical, which has been finished with breathtaking benefits. While the household is taller than typical Studio MK27 jobs, it has an extremely gentle visible existence, its pretty much transparent composition living in harmony with character from the bottom up. The floor flooring is a wooden deck in an enchantingly amorphous condition, entirely open to the bordering forest. It pays homage to the get the job done of famous Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and provides an intentional distinction with the rectangular concrete containers above. Even though the type of the decking is reminiscent of Marx’s operates, it was pushed as considerably by a devotion to preserving each and every solitary current tree on the parcel – an amenity valued even extra than possessing a bigger swimming pool. 

The first-amount concrete box frames sights of the surrounding foliage and functions as a verandah when the glass panels are open

The two stacked volumes earlier mentioned make up the house’s living areas. Both of those are cantilevered off an entry main and offset from just about every other, building a spectacular 15m span that would make the household look to float over the rainforest floor. The initial amount has a telescoping glass-panel procedure on both sides of the creating, giving the house its clear seem and experience, as well as strength-saving cross-ventilation. The concrete box – itself generating an open up, loft-design flooring program that involves the kitchen and dwelling spaces – frames views of the crowns that leading the surrounding trees and capabilities as a significant verandah when the home windows are fully open up. The household sits so close to the treetops that Kogan jokes: ‘Our clients cannot leave their bananas on the kitchen counter.’ 

The 2nd level houses 4 bedrooms, every single searching out over the rainforest’s canopy. This floor stands out for its elegant wood screens, mounted in entrance of glass panels. The screens are a purposeful and cultural nod to the regular gentle-diffusing muxarabi screens that were being initially introduced to southern Portugal by the invading Moors in the eighth century and which would inevitably come to be section of the Portuguese aesthetic that was exported to Brazil and other components of the lusophone planet in the generations that followed. 

The property is nestled at the edge of the Atlantic Forest, a mere 500m absent from the gorgeous Iporanga Beach front

Studio MK27 originally planned to paint these screens in their traditional gentle blue, the similar color that accents most of the historic Portuguese colonial constructions across Brazil, as a result the title Casa Azul. However, the staff ultimately opted for a organic wooden end on the screens to additional blend the house with the forest, instead than attract a distinction. Inspite of the change, the ‘Blue House’ moniker was retained.

The initial plan for the screens is a trace at what sets Studio MK27 aside. The studio has state-of-the-art the legacy of Brazilian architecture more than the past 20 yrs with a system of work that embraces the fashionable gestalt, even though getting historical cues from the Portuguese colonial era and prior Indigenous cultures that shaped modern day Brazil. Casa Azul perfectly exemplifies the studio’s trademark model – a clean, disciplined modernism that offers a abundant palette of normal elements, a target on craftsmanship, and an inherent reverence for both equally the earlier and mother nature. §

In a person of the four bedrooms, a latticed panel nods to traditional Moorish muxarabi screens