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| Wacky, Curvaceous Houses in Brazil That Feel Like Cocoons | Wacky, Curvaceous Houses in Brazil That Feel Like Cocoons |
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| THE POLISH BRAZILIAN designer and architect Jorge Zalszupin hated the beach, but he loved the beach house he built in 1972 for his family. Set back from the Atlantic coast in Guarujá, a resort town 40 miles southeast of São Paulo, the 2,842-square-foot white concrete dwelling looks like a block of bleached coral pulled from the ocean. The front door opens onto a spiral staircase that leads to a pair of bedrooms and a lofted lounge; below, the walls of a sunken living room curve up to a sculptural ceiling. A built-in couch wraps around a bell-shaped fireplace, its crescent hearth like an open mouth. Shielded from the Brazilian sun that his wife, a homemaker named Annette, and two daughters adored, Zalszupin would spend entire weekends listening to Chet Baker and Brahms, bent over mounds of clay that he formed into models for chairs and sofas — the furniture that had won him acclaim by the end of the 1950s — and for houses that were, until recently, far less known. | THE POLISH BRAZILIAN designer and architect Jorge Zalszupin hated the beach, but he loved the beach house he built in 1972 for his family. Set back from the Atlantic coast in Guarujá, a resort town 40 miles southeast of São Paulo, the 2,842-square-foot white concrete dwelling looks like a block of bleached coral pulled from the ocean. The front door opens onto a spiral staircase that leads to a pair of bedrooms and a lofted lounge; below, the walls of a sunken living room curve up to a sculptural ceiling. A built-in couch wraps around a bell-shaped fireplace, its crescent hearth like an open mouth. Shielded from the Brazilian sun that his wife, a homemaker named Annette, and two daughters adored, Zalszupin would spend entire weekends listening to Chet Baker and Brahms, bent over mounds of clay that he formed into models for chairs and sofas — the furniture that had won him acclaim by the end of the 1950s — and for houses that were, until recently, far less known. |
| Born in 1922 into a family of middle-class Jews in Warsaw — Jorge was originally Jerzy — Zalszupin narrowly escaped the Nazi invasion of the city, fleeing across the border in 1940 at 18. While many refugees continued onward to Palestine and from there to England, he found shelter with his father and sister in Bucharest, Romania, where he earned his architecture degree, not arriving in Brazil until after the war. “My father always told me that the Guarujá house was a womb,” says Veronica Zalszupin, 69, his older daughter. “Comfort was the whole point. He wanted to feel protected.” Set down among neocolonial cottages, Brutalist bunkers and postwar glass boxes, Zalszupin’s beach house, which is now occupied by his younger daughter, Marina, 66, was the earliest of 10 or so sculptural projects, most of them painted white, that the architect created until the late 1980s. (He retired in 1992.) Together, they represent a joyful, if inadvertent, rejoinder to the Modernist dogmas that have defined Brazilian design for nearly a century: In a country known for the futuristic curves of Oscar Niemeyer and the soaring concrete masses of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Zalszupin’s houses are clear outliers — organic and earthbound, personal and impossible to replicate. | Born in 1922 into a family of middle-class Jews in Warsaw — Jorge was originally Jerzy — Zalszupin narrowly escaped the Nazi invasion of the city, fleeing across the border in 1940 at 18. While many refugees continued onward to Palestine and from there to England, he found shelter with his father and sister in Bucharest, Romania, where he earned his architecture degree, not arriving in Brazil until after the war. “My father always told me that the Guarujá house was a womb,” says Veronica Zalszupin, 69, his older daughter. “Comfort was the whole point. He wanted to feel protected.” Set down among neocolonial cottages, Brutalist bunkers and postwar glass boxes, Zalszupin’s beach house, which is now occupied by his younger daughter, Marina, 66, was the earliest of 10 or so sculptural projects, most of them painted white, that the architect created until the late 1980s. (He retired in 1992.) Together, they represent a joyful, if inadvertent, rejoinder to the Modernist dogmas that have defined Brazilian design for nearly a century: In a country known for the futuristic curves of Oscar Niemeyer and the soaring concrete masses of Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Zalszupin’s houses are clear outliers — organic and earthbound, personal and impossible to replicate. |