The Modernism by Marcio Kogan

But this interpretation along the lines of rationalism seems to fade upon closer examination. Reason alone cannot explain that green roof that blends with the landscape, going well beyond the specific requirements of thermal protection and shelter. And it cannot explain the ambiguous and ambitious total absence of the glazings at the corners, making the house interact with nature in a much more forceful way than in the other works built by the Sao Paulo collective.

Furthermore, rationality cannot justify the appearance – for the first time in all of Marcio Kogan’s architecture – of a curved line, a poetic permeable brick wall that enters the house as if blown by the wind, bringing the sinuous sensuality of this landscape setting into the essentially Cartesian architecture of Studio mk27. In contact with the emotional impact of the Arcadian setting of Porto Feliz, Kogan’s modernism goes bucolic and the result work of architecture shifts gently into the realm of the masterpiece.

The photographs by Fernando Guerra lyrically narrate the perfect coexistence of these two different approaches. We see the logical space compressed below the large reinforced concrete slab with the Miesian pillar, but inside this space we also see a man (co-designer Lair Reis) seated on a strange colorful object hanging from the ceiling.

As in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, we do not see his face, but his back. We watch him as he watches the landscape, rigorously against the light, ecstatically lost in the vast beauty of nature. The reference to romantic nostalgia is very clear, and here it finds an original connection to Brazilian saudade. In this space, furthermore, the typical plastic indeterminacy of the multi-level home establishes an osmotic dialogue with nature, similar to what happened with the ruin in English landscape design.

The men working on the roof meadow also seem to respond to these idyllic references, calling to mind the farmers with big hats we encounter in the works of Hokusai. They suggest the love of Japan that is increasingly one of the most important drivers in the ongoing evolution of the architecture of Studio mk27.

Kogan’s frequent trips to the Far East and his increasingly intense contacts with that culture have brought very fertile themes into his research, much like what happened to Carlo Scarpa: a poetic focus on the threshold, the ritual, the value of gestures induced by architecture and the ability of architecture itself to determine frames of vision and spaces of contemplation. Through the resolved complexity of these heterogeneous crosswise grafts of meaning, the minimal architecture of Kogan moves programmatically and progressively away from the basically anti-humanist trap of today’s minimalism.

It is hard to say if this extraordinary vacation home at a distance of 100 kilometers from the urban chaos of Sao Paulo will be the start of a new phase for the Brazilian studio. What is clear is that it is yet another leap forward, among those over the last ten years that have lead to continuous, gradual evolution of the work of Studio mk27, with manifesto-houses immersed in the landscape.

Like the Lee House (2008–12), the MM House (2009–12), the Mororò House (2011–14), the Jungle House (2009–15), the Catuçaba Farm (2010–11) or the iconic Redux House (2009–13), all forerunners in a certain sense of the Planar House. Kogan defines his latest creation as “an exercise in horizontal radicalism,” but it is still a gentle radicalism, because from the outset this studio has seemed immune to provocation for its own sake, never allowing ideology and image to get the upper hand over the true needs of living.