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Architects: ARX Portugal Arquitectos
- Area: 400 m²
- Year: 2006
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Photographs:Fernando Guerra | FG+SG
Text description provided by the architects. This house took a real long time to come through. In this interval of a 7 years total, the context changed radically. What was once an inclined land lot with a panoramic view over the sea, has become a strangled place amidst high buildings, sometimes up to 9-storeys, meanwhile built in the way, between the houses and the sea.
This outcome was nonetheless predictable, given the available building-plans and the idyllic real-estate paintings, once again isolating the products they wish to sell in an exclusive relationship to the country or the sea. This time it was the sea.
Knowing this, and despite the harsh nature of the starting ground, the house went looking for its inner self, getting ready for the worst-case scenario, still taking for granted the sea breeze and the walking distance to the beach.
Totally defined in the allotment building license, the house grows into three floors, the lowest being both the garage and storage area.
The compulsory perimeter distances of the lot (3, 5 and 6 metres), common to any allotment across the country, force the compaction of the volume, releasing all around a “stripe“ of land, usually residual and hardly usable.
The designing process was much a (re)search for the different possibilities of the indoor-outdoor spatial relations (we assume this is very much why one builds a house in the first place). Outins were created, broadening the spectrum of possibilities, like the intervals between the body of the staircase and the rest of the house.
