ARX Architecture
Post By:Kitticoon Poopong
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Grândola, the place for which we designed this project is a town we have always loved. Our grandparents and our mother were born here and we always go back there with siblings in the summer. Although the town has fine and abundant specimens of popular Alentejo architecture, the allotment where the house is grounded is recent and peripheral, its urbanization is dense and most of it is pretentious and displaced.
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão The owners, Ângela e Carlos go far back to our childhood longlasting friendships.
The project evolved naturally, progressively, in short but strong steps. We started out from a frame of quite restrict programmatic data: number of rooms, living-room, kitchen, respective areas.
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Alongside all this, a recurring and assuring suggestion transferring the doubt onto the architect: "make like you were making your own".
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
We intended the exterior of the house to be simple and precise: compact, partially introverted, and assuring privacy in an area characterized by the close proximity of other buildings.
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
The house deals with the surroundings with both a circumstantial "mistrust" and a circumstantial "empathy". From the traditional Alentejo architecture, besides the solid white volume, it retains only some traces or topics. If weight and tectonic sense impose themselves, lightness and delicateness disappear. In the interior one finds the patio, an "absent" cube, both exterior and the centre of the house.
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Unexpectedly, one finds light, warmth, comfort, privacy, space and the transparency that the small and opaque outside volume seems to hide.
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
Photo © Courtesy of Daniel Malhão
The people
Architecture: ARX PORTUGAL, Arquitectos Lda. - José Mateus, Nuno Mateus
Work Team: Paulo Rocha, Isabel Gorjão Henriques
Address: Grândola, Portugal
Project: 1999
Construction: 2000-01
Gross Construction Area: 220 m2
Photography: Daniel Malhão, © DMF, Lisbon (Rights Reserved)
House in Grândola images / information from ARX
via:e-architect
