What is the departure point of a project? The plot shape, the relationship between the program and laws, the local climate? Clients’ African art collection shaped here some main fundamentals of the Ramp House, especially considering their initial intention to transform the place into a cultural foundation in the future.Project then linked an exhibition experience to an architectural promenade in which antique masks blend with everyday objects.
Bathed in sunlight from a skylight, a 25.5-meter long and 1.2-meter wide ramp embodies this concept and connects the ground floor of the living room with the first floor of the bedrooms through a fluid architecture experience.In dialogue with Brazilian modern and colonial tradition, the 4-meter wide veranda – covered by a cantilever and facing the garden – works as an interlude between the interior and exterior.This spatial continuity between garden and living room gains shape also in the façade: the external wood bends to the interior becoming the ceiling which, in turn, bends once again as a cladding for the ramp hall.
The tridimensional face construction composes the structure and volumetry: a box projected onto a cantilever sustained by thick side walls of raw concrete that work together with rationally distributed columns in order to make 9.7-meter spans possible.Text by Gabriel Kogan.
