MAREINES BUILDS A 1,350 SQM CLOISTER HOUSE IN BRAZIL

Mareines Arquitetura's new Passive House sits on 1,350 square meters in the interior of São Paulo state, and it cools itself with two slabs and deep eaves instead of a compressor. The building's most photographed feature is a curved brick roof that sheds rainwater straight into the swimming pool below it. At the center of the plan, architect Ivo Mareines walled off a triangular garden he calls a reinterpretation of the cloister, the kind of enclosed courtyard monasteries built for quiet and shade. Landscape office Vistara reforested the surrounding plot before a single wall went up, and Leonardo Finotti photographed the finished house.

1,350 Square Meters, One Triangular Cloister

The Passive House measures 1,350 square meters, and almost all of that area answers to a single walled garden shaped like a triangle. Three architectural arms of the house frame the garden on its three sides, holding water, shade, and a long bench for sitting still.

Mareines is explicit about the reference: this is a cloister, borrowed from the monasteries that used an enclosed courtyard to slow a person down before they got anywhere else in the building. The garden here does the same job. You cross it to reach the social rooms, the guest suites, or the pool, and the crossing is the point. Compare it to Res Patio, another Brazilian courtyard house Type7 flagged this year; where that project opens its center to the sky for ventilation, Mareines closes his with walls and lets the garden do quieter work.

The Brick Roof Does Two Jobs

The roof over the Passive House is exposed brick, curved, and built to collect water, not just shed it. Every drop that lands on the curve travels to the swimming pool, which means the roof is plumbing before it is architecture.

Underneath, double slabs and deep eaves do the temperature work that air conditioning would normally handle. The eaves keep direct sun off the walls for most of the day, and the air gap between the two slabs holds a layer of insulation that never touches a compressor. Mareines built the whole system to remove mechanical cooling from the house entirely, not just reduce it. That is a harder promise than most passive house branding makes, and it is also why the curve of the roof is not decorative. Every angle on that brick was chosen to move water and block sun at the same time.

Mareines Is Working the Same Ground as Paulo Mendes da Rocha

Brazilian architecture has a long relationship with courtyards and concrete used honestly, and Mareines is working inside that lineage rather than against it. Paulo Mendes da Rocha's 1974 Casa Millán in São Paulo used a defensive concrete shell and passive courtyard airflow half a century before Mareines built his cloister; both houses treat climate as a design problem solved with geometry, not machinery.

The material differs. Mendes da Rocha worked in raw concrete, Mareines in curved exposed brick, and that choice matters because brick reads warmer and more textured against the reforested land around the Passive House. Where Brutalism used mass to defend against Brazilian heat, Mareines uses curvature and shade, a lighter argument for the same climate. The pandemic sits behind the decision too. Mareines conceived the house during isolation, as a response to wanting a simpler, more self reliant life connected to land rather than a city grid.

"It Needed to Emerge From the Earth"

Ivo Mareines has one sentence that explains the entire house. "It was important for the house to emerge from the very earth," he says, adding that sustainability needs to be reflected, not just claimed. Project coordinator Isabella Slawka and architect Matthieu Van Beneden worked the plan with him, keeping the interior loose enough that social areas, guest suites, water, and light suggest boundaries without walls actually closing anything off.

That looseness matters for a passive system. A house that depends on airflow and shade instead of a compressor cannot afford rigid, sealed rooms; the plan has to breathe the same way the roof does. It also connects the Passive House to something outside architecture. The same pandemic instinct that pushed musicians toward stripped down home recording pushed Mareines toward a house that asks nothing of a mechanical system, just geometry and a reforested plot doing the work quietly.

No Air Conditioning, and That Is the Point

The Passive House is not a showpiece for solar panels or smart thermostats. The two slabs, the deep eaves, and the curved brick roof are the entire mechanical system, and none of them need power. That is the specific, verifiable claim here, not a vague sustainability pitch. A house of 1,350 square meters in São Paulo state with zero air conditioning and a roof that irrigates its own pool is a harder engineering problem than most passive certifications ask for, and Mareines solved it with shape rather than technology. The reforested plot and Leonardo Finotti's photographs will outlast any trend this gets filed under; the geometry is the argument, and it does not need updating.