Articles by Igor Fracalossi

The new Winspear Opera House in Dallas redefines the essence of an opera house for the twenty first century, breaking down barriers to make opera more accessible for a wider audience. Responding to the Dallas climate, a generous solar canopy extends from the building, revealing below a fully glazed sixty foot high lobby. This establishes a direct relationship between inside and outside, enhancing transparency. Beneath the canopy, which forms an integral part of the environmental strategy – a shaded pedestrian plaza creates a major new public space for Dallas, defined by the masterplan for the Performing Arts District. The masterplan was designed by Foster + Partners and OMA with Michel Desvigne.

The Maza house is a holiday home located in the natural setting surrounding the Lake of Valle de Bravo. It Is placed in an irregular difficult and steep slope area. The house is surrounded by a rill of clear water on one side, the vegetation of other buildings on the other side and lush forest in the rest of the edges.

Nestled into the hillside of a new regional park within the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area, three new camper cabins – built by county employees with the aid of high school students in a vocational training program – weave their way into a stand of pine trees. They serve as a key amenity in the first phase of the parks master plan.

With aspirations to be the first Living Building project in Texas, this 5,400-square-foot open-air pavilion is an education and meeting center that serves as a demonstration site for the Dixon Water Foundation. The project physically embodies their mission to promote healthy watersheds through sustainable land management, ensuring the preservation of our water resources.

This small summer house is located on a farm on the outskirts of Sao Roque, a town about 60km from São Paulo. Intended for short stays, the pavilion succinctly solves the program in two bedrooms and a living room with integrated kitchen, organized linearly allowing its openness to the views and the surrounding vegetation.

The site is located within a gated community in Brasilia, outside the urban context of the city and flanked by other houses. We use the highest occupancy rate allowed so as to enable the deployment of the house on a single level, as per the desire of the clients. We explore the views for the interior spaces of the site and create a central courtyard around which revolve the programmatic spaces. The living areas are open directly onto the courtyard, while the bedrooms turn their backs on it and open to the side of the lot. The social rooms of the house are organized in a continuous space, organized by an open central garden.

The site is located within a gated community in Brasilia, outside the urban context of the city and flanked by other houses. We use the highest occupancy rate allowed so as to enable the deployment of the house on a single level, as per the desire of the clients. We explore the views for the interior spaces of the site and create a central courtyard around which revolve the programmatic spaces. The living areas are open directly onto the courtyard, while the bedrooms turn their backs on it and open to the side of the lot. The social rooms of the house are organized in a continuous space, organized by an open central garden.

Situated on a site with a large number of native trees to be preserved and average slope of 30%, the implementation of the project suggests an intense dialogue with the existing topography and vegetation.

This project began with an e-mail and a meeting in fall of 2008 for a house in Yucca Valley, which is located near Palm Springs, east of Los Angeles in the high desert near the Joshua Tree National Park. We had completed two projects in Yucca Valley and occasionally received inquiries about projects in the desert.  In the midst of the economic downturn typically these inquiring led nowhere.  We had just had our second child and things were looking rather uncertain.