by Isabel Duprat

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The whole project of a house that looks outwards and intends to communicate with it, assumes that this exterior has a special quality. In essence, the longed-for interior / exterior integration takes place very rarely. Philip Johnson's glass house, the great inspiration and origin of everything, is in the middle of a park that gives it all the ambience. But what about the São Paulo urban house that opens to the high boundary walls?

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The careful and delicate location of the house is a crucial starting point, a moment so often overlooked in architectural design. It is necessary to scale the dimensions of the indentations very well in order to achieve the depth that is so necessary to feel breathing between walls. It is essential to carefully select the plant species that will conspire with this experience. One must work fully and devoid of any fear, working with shades as well as with light, to be in fact involved in the garden in a pleasant way and, above all, to experience it entirely with comfort and welcome, truly perceiving Nature. This is no easy task.

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With this premise, the course of the landscaping project began in 2003. Many rounds of brainstorm, the subsequent alteration of the architectural design team and the addition of the neighboring plot of land along the way, couldn’t change the primary conceptualization of architecture and landscaping which has always remained untouched by the architect client. The house would be a prism where the social space and office would be fully integrated and facing the garden through transparencies and large openings, being entirely embraced by vegetation.

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In order to completely experience the feeling of being in the middle of a garden, and not simply surrounded by plant beds, I located the house 12 meters away from the wall next to the street, and 40 cm above the level of the soil, so that the front garden could be seen from a perspective slightly above ground level, through a walkway reaching 10 cm below the floor level of the room.

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This frontal clearance still reserved 25 m in length on the north face.

 

From the point of view of the living room, the carefully tuned dimensions make us perceive the feeling of “place”.

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​The obvious thing would be to leave a huge garden behind, the backyard of our imagination, and a small garden in front, which would not reflect these desired sensations. However this distance from the street created a generous space so that a story could be told from the sidewalk to the front door, a route to be enjoyed, a refuge or even an atmosphere that prepares you for your arrival at the house.

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​I wanted to bring to this entrance garden my translation of our forests. You don’t imitate woods, the gods thing, but I wanted to bring the feeling of what we experience when we enter it. It is the emotion of being in an unknown, and even adverse, territory that imposes respect on us, causes restlessness and instigates curiosity. The smell of the freshness of wet plants entwined with each other and mixed in all their colors and textures: ferns, selaginellas, calateas, begonias, philodendrons carpeting the floor, sprawling ingas, delicate Handroanthus umbellatus, Pachira aquatica and slender palms, all in the scale of our fantasy. It is a forest that we feel untouched, perceiving and advancing as if by magic. The landscaping project's contribution of placing the house 40 cm above the garden level was decisive for this experience to be complete.

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​​From time to time, we are graced with small shallow water mirrors, which take the place of puddles exposing large stones covered with moss and offering a soft sound of running water. As we walk down the walkway above the mosaic of textures of this humid garden, we explore these cuts with a careful and attentive step.

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​In Japanese houses, the stones of the entrance path always receive you wet, as a sign of respect. I was welcomed like this years later on a trip to Japan and I understood then the delicacy of this ceremony.

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​On the north face, we planted large and beautiful trees from our forests, and a lawn was offered to admire them. Access to this garden is via a solid staircase that contrasts with the front facade where the house appears to be floating. A Hymenaea courbaril, a Lecythis pisonis and a Seemania sylvatica, planted already mature, gave the house a time of existence. The location of these trees and their size qualifies the space and the distance, and the relationship between them creates meanders and layers up to the boundary. The high walls were covered with a thick layer formed by vertical trees, shrubs and palm trees concealing the limits. A living space was created with the planting of such a familiar jaboticaba tree, receiving a gravel floor and a small stone fountain of delicate running water, inspired by Noguchi.

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Taking advantage of a white wall that contains the service area, I planted a row of Calycophyllum spruceanum arranged to allow the light to reflect, drawing a large vertical mural that alters color with the passing of the seasons, as do the trunks when shedding their bark.

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I visit this garden with some frequency, and I have somehow become intimate with its living. I am happy to see it grow with some ease. The trees clung to the place looking as if they had always been tangled together. Birds, some even of a certain size, splash in the small mirrors of water. Some foliage proved to be more spacious than others, some replacements were necessary, and the small forest is gradually freeing itself from our imagination.

 

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