Project: Zigzag House
Architects: Architectare
Location: Petropolis, Brazil
Area: 4.057 sf
Year: 2019
Photographs by: Leonardo Finotti
Zigzag House by Architectare
This cost-effective house was designed for a young couple with a modular approach to construction. It divides the program into service, social, and intimate blocks, forming squares at their intersections. A winter garden separates the social and intimate areas. The metal structure and aluminum roofing ensure a quick and lightweight construction process. Peroba wood paneling on the interior roof adds warmth. Large glass panels open up the rooms to the outdoors. Future plans include sliding brises and a pergola to extend living spaces.
Designed for a young couple with two children, the dream of building their first home, and a limited budget, this house was designed to be very simple and “cheap”. To this end, a modulation was adopted that repeats throughout the construction, where the program can be well distributed and the work could be divided into stages, with the possibility of the garage and the last room being built later, if necessary.
To avoid a linear volume on the land, the program was divided into three blocks of different uses, the service, the social, and the intimate, which were arranged in such a way that the angles generated by their encounters formed squares. At the meeting between the social and intimate blocks, the roof was removed and the square is a winter garden that brings greenery and natural light into the house and separates the two functions through a glass gallery, providing more privacy to the rooms.
At the meeting between the social and service blocks, the roof was extended and received a skylight, creating space for the gourmet balcony that connects directly to the pool terrace and the dining room, fully integrating leisure, social, and service functions, configuring itself as the heart of the house. In addition to the distribution of the program, special care was taken with the choice of materials and the conceptualization of the structure.
To shorten the construction time and the ease of fitting the stages that could be built separately, a metal structure was chosen, and to make it lighter, the house was distributed on only one floor, without a slab. For the roof, an aluminum sandwich-type tile was chosen, very light and quick to build, providing a simple and lightweight metal structure, giving a lot of lightness to the architecture, as well as ensuring good thermal and acoustic comfort.
In the angle where the gourmet balcony is located, the twisted roof maintains its inclinations varying only the heights of the ridges, all in balance taking full advantage of the metal structure, always apparent. Considering the history of the land with small floods, it was chosen to raise the floor of the construction with a metal structure only supported on concrete footings, leaving this metal belt visible, like a seat 35cm above the ground.
For a greater sense of home, we maintained the interior slope of the roof, which was covered with peroba wood paneling throughout the length of the construction, excluding only the service areas and bathrooms where drywall was chosen for cost-effectiveness. Both in the social and intimate blocks, aluminum frames were used, with large glass panels in the sliding doors so that all rooms can open to the land and be used as balconies.
It was also planned for the bedroom block, the future installation of sliding brises in front of all glass doors, and a pergola in the back of the living room, expanding the living area to the back garden, but these stages of the work have not yet been completed.
