ArchShowcase Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. Orchidarium Professora Ruth Cardoso in Villa-Lobos Park, Brazil by Decio Tozzi ArchitectMay 24th, 2011 by Sumit Singhal
The orchidarium Professor Ruth Cardoso has its form inspired on the “habitat” of the africans, indigenous and pré-colombian’s cultures.
The solutions for the domain and transformation of nature were studied to indentify the way to obtain diffuse illumination and permanent ventilation using constructive process and form suitable with thecnique used by these cultures. In this way the forms found in several Africans communities and indigenous Brazilians tribes, that use zenithal openings for the controlled entrance of light and permanent ventilation, made with soil, assume, through actual steel thecnology with glass and plastic transparent walls, a diaphanous hut form. A leaked beam, in an arc shape, structure the model and propose the orchidarium scale offering the necessary air volume to the permanent air’s displacement, required to keep the orchid’s delicacy. From both side of this leaked beam there are a sequence of curve frame-work supported on the ring of the semi-circular, locked by horizontals meridians that configure the quarter of sphere of the orchidarium’s form. On one side the intersection of this metallic spherical structure make itself in the beam’s inferior architrave and on the other side in the beam’s superior architrave, enabling the air’s escape through the concrete master arc’s openings that has the permanent ventilation’s function. Its implantation follows the pre-colombian habitat’s implantation lesson, found in Brasil, that used to bury half of the habitation to be protected from the strong wind, letting only the roofs outside. Similarly, in the Villa-Lobos Park, the Orchidarium’s level is 1,5 meters bellow the land line and the access is through a generous ramp since the entrance. This solution creates a foundation naturally, above 1,20 meters from the Park’s level, where lands the hut’s transparent form that configures the Orchidarium. Its scale integrates itself to the Park’s free space and relates, harmoniously, with the other Park’s buildings and the water’s tower. Thus the orchidarium’s design created as diaphanous hut, honors the Professor Ruth Cardoso as a contemporaneous expression of primitive cultures that as anthropologist she studied and as citizen she always defended. Contact Decio Tozzi Architect
Tags: Brazil, Villa-Lobos Park Category: Public Art |