Archinect - News

Tetro’s new residence floats and weaves through the Brazilian rainforest

2023-06-12T11:49:00-04:00

Brazilian architecture studio Tetro has offered a look inside their completed residential project in the Atlantic Rainforest. Named Casa Açucena, the development was constructed on a steep slope amidst a landscape of dense trees and shrubs.

Photo credit: Jomar Bragança

The scheme was designed to occupy the space between existing trees without removing or altering the topography. The design team’s dedication to preserving the existing landscape also saw the house elevated off the ground to allow animal and plant life to develop underneath.

Photo credit: Jomar Bragança

“The project is a response to a sensitive reading of the terrain, where first contact dictated the need to maintain its natural characteristics,” the team explained. “The act of looking upwards, from the ground to the fifteen-meter canopy of the trees, was decisive for the creation of a concept addressing the challenge of building in a place with such steep topograph...

Welcome to the jungle: Sou Fujimoto lectures on applying natural infrastructure to urban design

2015-05-12T17:39:00-04:00

When an architect talks about “transparency,” as Sou Fujimoto did during his well-attended lecture at UCLA’s Decafe at Perloff Hall on Friday, it’s always a relief when it refers to more than a literal degree of opacity. Presenting nine of his projects in a lecture than ran ten minutes over time, Fujimoto framed his practice in terms of applying the complex organizational structure of nature to urban environments. Fujimoto grew up in relatively bucolic Hokkaido and later moved to Tokyo, where he perceived the mess of urban density with its skyscrapers and street-level food stalls as a kind of steel and glass forest, replete with pockets of intimacy and inspiring vistas. This central concept of the forest and its alternating layers of transparency and density neatly encapsulates the bulk of Fujimoto’s work. But the “transparency” in Fujimoto’s work extends far beyond the stagger of windows and literal glass houses: here is an architecture that seems to embody the 21st notion of priva...