Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris, George A. Fuller Construction Co, and Richard Craig, Reading Room of the Dag Hammarskjöld Library at UN Headquarters (NYC), 1961.
Alvar Aalto, Lecture Hall in the Viipuri Library (Finland), 1935.
“The narrative cities are explorations into urban systems that are stretched and morphed by narratives into absurdities. Each contains a story about its formation, function, and ideology.”
Cerrado House by
Vazio S/A was built at the foothills of Sierra da Moeda, a mountain range in the state of Minas Gerias, Brazil. The three-bedroom house has a rooftop pool and a wide staircase that leads to the rooftop terrace. The rooms are right under the swimming pool and have views to the sierra and the savanna full of twisted trees;
wooden louvers shield the house from the sun.
Seeking the plasticity of basic architectural elements, the project also exalts an underestimated and threatened biome: the Cerrado, a Brazilian savanna. There is no landscape design: the house sits on a found landscape, whose immensity and vistas are best seen from the pool terrace.
In every corner of the world, devastation of war, massacres, oppression, disease and death are the cause of widespread human disorders with no imaginable ending. When disasters force people to migration, where would they be welcomed with open arms? Hoping for a better life, they struggle in a never-ending limbo, a strange place with no identity that does not belong to them.
Maybe it is only at this point, when nature can be a safe haven for these refugees. Sky becomes the ceiling and mountains the walls of their new home; because Nature is the only promising place that shelters these people, an eternal and everlasting refuge.