Christian Kerez . photos: © Maxime Delvaux
During the work on Porto Seguro Social Housing, the extension of a favela in Paraisópolis, Brazil we built 2 private houses on 2 different, very demanding sites – one in Zürich and one close to Zürich. Both houses were designed for 3 families offering wide open spaces. A new client from Prague asked for a building with 3 apartments. This house became the antithesis of the 2 projects we had just completed in Switzerland and related more strongly to the beauty and design challenges of the small vertically organized spaces of the favela.
The term atomized space that we used to describe the urban quality of a favela or a Mediterranean or Japanese medieval village, we used again for the private house in Prague. The public exterior space became through this abstract term a private interior space. The residential housing became a sculpture in a garden. With 67 rooms for 3 apartments, the house is a system of spaces. The circular rooms of each apartment on each floor are open to one another and connected in various ways to a sequence of space. These spaces expand towards the interior of the house. Only the spaces between the circular rooms can be closed. The whole project is based in a very traditional, nearly archaic way, but its experience as a spatial system is radical and new.
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