Cerrado House II property, Minas Gerais building, Brazil modern architcture photos, Contemporary Moeda home

Cerrado House II, Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte

4 Nov 2021

Design: Vazio S/A architects

Location: Moeda – a municipality in the state of Minas Gerais, Southeast region of Brazil

Photos by Leonardo Finotti

Cerrado House II, Moeda

The Cerrado is one of the country’s seven biomes and covers an area of 1.5 million km². It holds about a third of all Brazilian biodiversity, 5% of the world’s flora and fauna, and is home to the headwaters of the three largest hydrographic basins in the country (Amazon, São Francisco, and Paraná/ Paraguay).

It has a unique flora and stands out for its generously-spaced trees and low-slung brushwood, blending into a South-American variation on the African savannah and the European steppe. Given its ecological, geopolitical and cultural specificities, the Cerrado is considered the biome of national integration.

The soils of the Cerrado were once regarded as too acidic to farm. But since agronomists began applying industrial quantities of lime in the 1980s, these soils have been transformed. The Cerrado now produces 70% of Brazil’s agricultural output.

In recent years, the rate of ecological destruction of the Cerrado has been twice that of the Amazon, and while the majority of the Amazon rainforest survives, more than 60% of the Cerrado’s former 200 million hectares has disappeared under the plough, and most of that within the last two decades alone. It has been a black hole for conservation: only 2% of the ecosystem is protected. However, Brazilian agriculturalists and ministers still talk as if it had no conservation value at all.

Project Objectives

The Cerrado House was built at the foothills of the Sierra da Moeda, a mountain range in the state of Minas Gerais. The three-bedroom house has a rooftop pool and a wide staircase that leads to the rooftop terrace. The rooms are right under the swimming pool and have views of the sierra, the Cerrado and its twisted trees. Louvers on the northern and western faces protect against the inclement sun.

The play between function and form here is spontaneous and undogmatic: the ramps and stairs of the swimming pool are stamped irrepressibly onto the façades and shape the internal space. The employment of the programmatic source is made directly manifest: it is a generative strategy that explores the programme/form relationship as an absolute correspondence.

Performance Description

Seeking the plasticity of basic architectural elements, the project also exalts this underestimated and threatened biome: the Cerrado. There is no landscape design: the house sits on natural terrain, whose immensity and vistas are best seen from the pool terrace.

Cerrado House II in Minas Gerais, Brazil – Building Information

Authors: Carlos M Teixeira, Leonardo Rodrigues (collab. arch.), Daila Araújo (collab. arch.)
Project: 2013
Construction: 2014-2015
Total area: 320 sqm
Closed area: 142 sqm
Site: 3 ha.
Location: Moeda, Brazil

Architectural design: Vazio S/A
Structural design: RAD
Electrical design / Plumbing: Matheus Elias
Construction: Nova Engenharia

Main Suppliers :
Frames aluminum louvers: JJ Esquadrias
Marble and granite: Arq Pedras
Metals: Docol
Crockery: Celite
Fixtures: Templuz
Ceramics: Vitrale
Furniture: Vazio S/A
Pool: Sol e Ar

Project size: 340 sqm
Site size: 20000 sqm
Completion date: 2016
Building levels: 2

Photography: Leonardo Finotti

Cerrado House II, Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte images / information received 041121 from Vazio S/A architects

Vazio on e-architect

Cerrado House, Moeda, Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brasil
Design: Vazio S/A architects

image from Vazio S/A architects studio
Cerrado House in Minas Gerais