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Strange Home has a Concrete Office Looming Above

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This startling tube suspends itself over a home, looking like a shipping container about to drop on the inhabitants below.

The tube seemingly hanging in the sky is the office space for a live/work home in San Paolo, Brazil, featured at Arch Daily.

Below it, as if suspended from the tube hanging in the sky are the kitchen and bedrooms for a family.

Under the looming office in the sky, (is Daddy’s job to be God, perhaps?) the kids eke out their kid existence.

Commercial materials: simple expanses of concrete and glass make for a powerful statement.

The family space is enclosed between building-height walls that wall the living spaces off from the neighbors in a protective private space underneath.

As long as you stay in the sheltered living areas, these are some powerful and beautiful spaces. But hanging as they do from the shipping container office overhead, there must be a sense of dependence and ever-present danger. There must be a sense that you may not venture out of the compound with its roof-height concrete wall surroundings.

If you do, the yellow container in the sky is always there, ready to drop its heavy weight on you.

The suspended spaces are lovely, beguiling and clever. But the sense of impending doom from above must be quite frightening and sinister.

This house feels as if the architect is expressing the psychology of a very distinct personality. It seems as if a very overprotective and domineering work-at-home parent with a Very Important Job needs the family below to feel controlled by fear.

The Carapiuiba House has to be one of the odder live/work spaces I’ve ever seen: a grand endeavor that risks all, and comes up with something completely new. The architects are Angelo Bucci and Alvaro Puntoni.