Excerpt: Xingu House by Tetro Arquitetura emerges from a careful reading of the site, where architecture rests on the terrain and opens itself to the landscape. The project establishes a continuous dialogue between topography, structure, and experience, allowing nature to pass through its voids. Sculptural pillars, preserved forest, and existing stone walls shape a house that follows the land rather than transforming it.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] Xingu House emerges from a careful reading of the site: a terrain composed of natural plateaus, stone walls, and preserved patches of forest. From this irregular geography, the project seeks to understand how architecture could lean on the terrain, open itself to the landscape, and build a continuous relationship between the body of the house and the mountain.
The main volume of the house rests on the old stone walls, reaching for the view and floating above the ground. Its form is organized into three sectors, three wings projecting in distinct directions, each responding to a specific fragment of the landscape. At the highest point—six meters above the natural level—are the two main suites, designed as a continuous viewpoint toward the mountains.
The other two wings rest on the existing plateau and house the living room, guest bedrooms, office, and kitchen—enclosed spaces that open toward the upper contour of the site, dissolving boundaries between interior and exterior.
The support of this fluid form is achieved through six concrete pillars shaped like sculptures. They are thick, asymmetrical, and almost monolithic. Instead of hiding the structure, the project turns it into a gesture: the pillars become presence. Each one accommodates essential functions—bathrooms, stairs, the elevator—transforming itself into inhabited space. The house rests lightly upon these concrete sculptures, as if touching the terrain only where necessary.
On the lower level, in direct contact with the ground, lies the leisure area: an open space integrated with the pool, bar, and resting zones. It is also on this level that an existing underground gallery on the site was incorporated into the project and adapted as a wine cellar, connecting the new construction to what remained from the former occupation.
Detached from the main body, within the preserved forest, sits the spa—an independent volume that settles among the trees without suppressing the vegetation. It contains the sauna, resting rooms, and gym, forming a retreat immersed in the natural environment.
Xingu House is built as a continuous dialogue between topography, structure, and experience—an architecture that rests on sculptural pillars, follows the terrain, opens to the landscape, and allows nature to pass through its voids.
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