Library House
When in the summer of 2014, founding members of Atelier Branco, Matteo Arnone and Pep Pons were approached to design a leisurely retreat in the small town of Vinhedo, the brief posited that the house be able to accommodate at least two kind of needs: the need for a place to read, immersed within the site?s vibrant vegetation; the need for a place to think, reposed under the placidness of the area?s boundless subtropical skies. The client, a left block activist against Brazil?s military dictatorship in his youth and now renowned scholar of the history of political thought, had conceived of the house as a temporary haven between São Paulo and Campinas, at which the State University he held teaching posts since the beginning of the nineteen eighties. It was thus neither to be a permanent place of residence nor a holiday home as conventionally understood, but a place of reverie and contemplation, occasionally of work, away from the bustle of Brazil?s hectic metropolitan life. Photography by © Ricardo Bassetti
The latest of five built works designed by the young Italo-Hispanic duo, Casa Biblioteca embodies the practice?s attentive research into architectural form, matured both during their formative years in Switzerland, where they had been students of the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, and in their professional upbringings under practitioners of the caliber of Christian Kerez, Kengo Kuma and the two Aires Mateus brothers. It is a bold scheme, almost ent...