Cerrado House

Set on the foothills of the Serra da Moeda in Minas Gerais, Brazil, Cerrado House is a three-bedroom home that the studio Vazio S/A built into a remote stretch of one of the country's most threatened landscapes. A rooftop pool crowns the house, reached by a wide staircase that climbs to a rooftop terrace. The bedrooms sit directly beneath the pool and open to views of the sierra and the twisted trees of the Cerrado, while louvres on the northern and western faces temper the strong sun.

Form follows programme here in a deliberately undogmatic way. The ramps and stairs of the pool are pressed into the façades and go on to shape the interior, so that the plan reads directly in the elevations. There is no separate landscape scheme. The house rests on the natural terrain, and its surroundings are best taken in from the pool terrace.

The project also doubles as an argument for the Cerrado itself. This savannah-like biome covers some 1.5 million km² and holds roughly a third of Brazil's biodiversity, around 5 per cent of the world's flora and fauna, and the headwaters of the Amazon, São Francisco and Paraná/Paraguay basins. Once thought too acidic to farm, its soils were transformed by heavy liming from the 1980s and now yield about 70 per cent of Brazil's agricultural output. In recent years the Cerrado has been cleared at roughly twice the rate of the Amazon: more than 60 per cent of its original 200 million hectares has gone under the plough, most of that within two decades, yet only about 2 per cent of the ecosystem is protected. By sitting lightly on untouched ground, the house keeps that loss in view.

Project details: total area 320 m², of which 142 m² is enclosed, on a 3 hectare site. Designed in 2013 and built between 2014 and 2015.

Architecture: Vazio S/A (Carlos M Teixeira, with Leonardo Rodrigues, Daila Araújo and Frederico Almeida). Structural design: RAD. Electrical and plumbing: Matheus Elias. Construction: Nova Engenharia. Photography: Gabriel Castro.