Pátio Huguenot
A shelter for horses and riders was placed in the core of an urban landscape.
This city area was born from a slow collective construction, a sequence of times and persons transformed this specific place into a rich collection of urban situations where different scales and programs are placed side by side. The building followed this plural urban atmosphere, catching it’s own tune within the existing melody. The most valuable archive of possibilities for the new building were already there...simply waiting to be revealed.
For horses: five cells, a storage space and a covered outdoor space for horse cleaning, all on the ground floor. For riders: bathing, toilet, living room with balcony and an exhibition space for prizes, all on the upper floor. Man and Horse: two different scales to manage in a single volume.
The intervention follows the ancient relation between this two different bodies, shapes and forms. The building is composed by three materials: concrete walls support the solid wood body of the ground floor (horse) which receives, smooth and delicately, the upper floor (man) made in a wooden skeleton clad in corrugated sheet metal.
The project intends to create some new perspectives for the owners and their relationship with the surrounded area, for the site and the program asks for new interventions and for an art of building apart from that which is today much too related to formal and photographic consumption. This was our goal.