Discover A Brazilian Modular Home Nestled In Nature’s Embrace

For the first three years of his life, Brazilian architect Rodrigo Ohtake lived in a São Paulo apartment building designed by his father, Ruy, and named for his grandmother, Tomie, a renowned abstract artist who painted the tower’s white facade with oscillating bands of color. Completed in 1985, the building’s powerful concrete construction gestured to the Paulista brutalism that Ruy Ohtake had learned as a student at the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism—the same school where his son would study in the early 2000’s—while its curved balconies suggested the sumptuous forms and colors that defined his later work.

“I’ve been an architect since I was born,” says Rodrigo Ohtake, who merged his own small studio with his father’s firm in 2021, following Ruy’s death from cancer at age 83. “My family has been working in Brazilian culture for 60 years—we have a kind of a tradition,” he observes. “But we try to look to the future, not the past.”

That penchant for experimentation played a central role in the modular home that Ohtake built in 2023 for himself, his art-curator wife, and their three young children outside Ibiúna, a hill-country town southwest of São Paulo. Designed by Ohtake and manufactured by sysHaus, a producer of prefabricated homes, the 1,940-square-foot country residence comprises four 10-by-20-foot steel prisms, each with a different typology but all containing a bedroom. These are arranged like a pinwheel around a central void, which accommodates the open-plan living space. Sliding glass doors opening onto the surrounding forest and 33-foot-long steel beams (the maximum size sysHaus can use without support columns) define the edges of the communal volume at the building’s core. As in Brazil’s colonial terrace houses, Ohtake notes, “The void is where the house happens.”

To break with the orthogonal rigidity imposed by the prefabricated modules, Ohtake shielded the exposed corners of the bedroom units with freestanding, wavelike screens of blue perforated steel. This is almost an inversion of the house his father designed for his grandmother in 1968 and expanded through the decades as his aesthetic transformed. While the son uses curves to create privacy and blur his home’s strictly rational silhouette, the father leveraged the open floor plan enabled by the floating concrete-canopy roof—a typical feature of Paulista modernism—to insert rounded dividing walls painted in vivid primary colors.

The Ibiúna house is capped with an exuberant, amoebalike roof cut from orange steel. This shape, Ohtake acknowledges, was partly inspired by his favorite structure in São Paulo: Oscar Niemeyer’s Marquise do Ibirapuera, a covered pathway beneath a sinuous, white concrete-slab marquee that snakes between the trees in the city’s most important park, connecting buildings and offering shelter from the intense subtropical sun and rain. For insulation, Ohtake topped most of the roof with 6 inches of soil in a free-form planter bursting with grasses and hanging vines. A grassy ramp curls up one flank of the house to merge with the roof at the back. Embraced by the earth and practically erased from view, the home becomes a steel cave enlivened by the intrusions of the surrounding landscape. “When the wind blows, you almost feel the trees are inside the house—a lot of leaves come in, which I think is marvelous,” Ohtake enthuses. “I wanted to show that industrial materials can be in harmony with nature.”

The entire project served as a proof-of-concept for prefabrication in a country where, for the most part, Ohtake says, “We are still doing architecture as if we were building pyramids, brick by brick, when we should be building more like LEGO.” Despite pioneering architects like João Filgueiras Lima, better known as Lelé, who began developing ingenious modular construction systems in the 1960’s and continued innovating through the ’80’s, Ohtake believes most Brazilians still associate prefabrication with American-style cabinet construction introduced in the ’70’s. That flimsy, disposable approach held little appeal for families that regard their homes as patrimony for their children. “We can only prove that these houses are permanent by building them,” he asserts, something sysHaus will do when it starts shipping its first Ohtake-designed modular homes across the country later this year.

For Ohtake, modular-systems architecture is, above all, an extension of a generations-long inheritance of materializing a future that looks different from the past. That forward-looking attitude expresses itself in the Ibiúna house, of course, but even more powerfully in the way the family uses it. “I don’t have to worry about toys,” the architect reports. “The kids just go into nature to play with wood and leaves, stones and sand.” Educated to value rationality but raised to question its primacy, Ohtake worries over the future of a society that trains young people out of creativity in favor of more reliably profitable skills. “I’m trying to tell my children, ‘Use your sense of play, it will help you in your future,’ which is something I can say from experience,” he concludes. “The world is too serious. We should have more play.”

Inside This Modular Home In Brazil

OHTAKE: ANDREI DA SILVA; LEONARDO ROCHA; ISABELLA MARTINI; CARLA STELLA. SYSHAUS: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT AMÉRICA MÓVEIS: CLUB CHAIR (LIVING AREA), SOFA (TV AREA). ARTI MÓVEIS: ARM-CHAIR, COFFEE TABLES (LIVING AREA), SIDE TABLE (LIVING AREA, TV AREA). 31 MOBILIÁRIO: SLING CHAIR (LIVING AREA), CHAIR, STOOL (TV AREA). PUNTO E FILO: RUGS (LIVING AREA, TV AREA) TETO VINÍLICO: VINYL CEILING (BEDROOM). MEKAL: WORKSTATIONS (KITCHEN). THROUGHOUT JAPI: OUT-DOOR FURNITURE. TARKETT: VINYL FLOORING.

A Design Legacy Lives on in This Eco-Focused Park in Brazil

When the brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana opened their eponymous design studio Estúdio Campana in São Paulo in 1984, their witty, daring sensibility came as a shock to an architecture scene defined by one of the world’s most robust modernist traditions. Over the last four decades, they’ve invented a language all their own, making furniture with scrap wood and stuffed animals, cast bronze and bubble wrap.

In 2020, the brothers started work on a sprawling, 130-acre park in their rural hometown of Brotas, a 150-mile drive northwest of the city. Since his sibling’s untimely death in 2022 at age 61, Humberto, eight years Fernando’s senior, has thrown himself into that final shared project, slated to soft open in June as a place for conservation and study, but also, like all their work, of provocation and play. As Estúdio Campana looks toward its 40th anniversary, Humberto tells us more.

A Conversation With Estúdio Campana on Design, Conservation, and More

Interior Design: Could you start by talking about how Brotas shaped your work?

Humberto Campana: I was very blessed to have been born and raised there because it has such a beautiful landscape. But at the same time, it was extremely boring, so Fernando and I created our own universe. There was a movie theater that screened American westerns and films from Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini and we would recreate the scenery in our yard. We made an unconscious vocabulary that we would only discover years later.

We also avoided being contaminated by modernism. Brazilian architecture has such a strong connection to its modern tradition, but Brazil is much more than that. It’s crazy and colorful, full of texture and even kitsch, and we wanted to bring that into our work. We’re maximalists! We should be proud of all the elements of our cultural heritage.

ID: When you founded the studio, who were your peers and mentors?

HC: My icons were Roberto Burle Marx and Oscar Niemeyer, but especially Lina Bo Bardi. She was a modernist but also interested in the countryside, in our African and Indigenous heritage. She pointed us to Brazil. Fernando and I tried to be industrial designers in the beginning, which at the time meant thinking in terms of utility and mass production, but we failed! We always looked for freedom in our work because we know what it is to live under a dictatorship. Our first exhibition, in 1989, a few years after the dictatorship ended, was called Uncomfortable and it was filled with that anger over all the brutality our country had suffered. Because that’s the real Brazil, too.

ID: How did Parque Campana come into existence?

HC: My grandfather had used this property as a coffee plantation. Later, my father rented it out to cattle ranchers. From the time Fernando and I inherited it, we wanted to use it for conservation, but we were nomads, traveling all over the world, so we kept renting because we didn’t want it to sit there abandoned. When the pandemic came, it put us right back in the countryside and we started thinking: We’ve done workshops all over the world, why not in our hometown?

Growing up, it took almost eight hours to get to Sao Paulo on the unpaved roads, and we would see wolves and jaguars and other animals. Nowadays it’s a desert of sugarcane and soy beans. We wanted to seduce people—the families who work in the agri-businesses that are devastating the environment—with poetry, music, and film. We’ve planted over 16,000 trees, and the idea is to plant more, working with agronomists and environmental engineers.

Then we had the idea to create 12 architectural pavilions (there are six, so far) as spaces where people can have classes, meditate, and watch movies and concerts. There will be an educational program, too, both artistic and environmental, and it’s important for us that all the park’s furniture is produced in the countryside with local materials.

I want to create a school to preserve craft traditions with workshops for welding, weaving, painting, embroidery—all the things we used to have in Brotas when I was a child. Across the world, people are finally giving these crafts the respect they deserve. It’s the right moment to invest in the countryside. Life has been so generous to me and, living in a country with such deep social divisions, I feel it’s time to give back.

ID: What are your future plans for the park? For the practice?

HC: Right now in the park, all the poetry is there, but none of the logistics, so I’m working with a firm in São Paulo to complete all of that. In the studio, we’re working on a documentary that will launch at the Milan Triennale during the Salone and an exhibition at Friedman Benda in New York. I’m also working on a book about our way of thinking and making. But really, I’m focused on opening the park.

ID: Can you speak a bit about how the loss of your brother has affected your practice?

HC: Fernando and I had a wonderful relationship. There was so much trust and respect and intimacy. When I lost him, I felt completely naked, and thought it would be so difficult to keep creating. But I’m actually in a very creative moment right now. Creativity gave me a voice—I came from the countryside, I was supposed to be no one—and now it’s helping me to survive. The park is a memorial, an homage. All the energy I’m investing in it—it’s for him.

ESTÚDIO PLANTAR IDEIAS; LICURÍ PAISAGISMO: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE.