Project: Gutter House
Architects: Atelier Daniel Florez
Location: Brazil
Area: 3,982 sf
Year: 2021
Photographs by: Maira Acayaba, Juan Gomez
Gutter House by Atelier Daniel Florez
Gutter House, located in a Brazilian fishing village, is a unique project consisting of two beach houses designed for two friends. The architecture of these houses pays homage to the historical maritime expertise of shipbuilders who constructed the baroque cathedrals of cities in the region. The houses draw inspiration from the landscape’s undulating dunes and the sea. They feature amphibious wave-like structures constructed from wood that guide water from the roof through a long concrete gutter covered in blue ceramic tiles, which irrigates plants on the rear façade, providing shade and protection from the intense evening sun.
Gutter House is a project of two paired beach houses for two friends in a fishing village in Sagi, a village in northeastern Brazil, the closest South American continental point to Europe. For centuries, the ships of the Portuguese Empire have sailed those waters swayed by the trade winds that they used for trading, fishing, and building cities and settlements.
Curiously, the anonymous architects who had the knowledge to erect the baroque cathedrals of those cities were the shipbuilders. With their constructive knowledge of wood, transmitted for generations, they achieved great fame and prestige and erected the cathedrals of cities as important as the nearby Olinda, with its wooden structure crowned by majestic baroque domes.
The project, many centuries later, wants to poetically honor the memory of those architects and sailors and evoke the sensuality of the landscape and the mystery of the Ocean with its silent geometry.
The house is inserted into the urban landscape of elegant ceramic tilted houses, by drawing two amphibious waves of wood. These undulations, at the same time that they dialogue with the dunes of the landscape, pour the water from the roof into a 22m-long concrete gutter covered in blue ceramic tiles that conduct the water to irrigate the plants on the rear façade creating a green protection against the strong sun of the evening.
Conceptually, the house is built as an inverted ship, with a succession of structural elements of laminated wood (ribs) fixed to a concrete gutter always visible inside the house.
The interior, conformed by a mantle of curved wooden and bamboo beams, evokes naval interiors with great sensuality and, together with the sculpted pillars like masts, the circular windows, the flooring fishing scales patterns, and the blue colors honor the craft and knowledge of those ancient and heroic sailor-architects. With a double façade on both fronts and a double roof finished with wooden tiles, the project intends to insert itself silently into the landscape with minimal ecological impact.
