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Architects: Atelier Paralelo
- Year: 2013
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Photographs:Joana França
"(...) One of the most distressing aspects of our time is the total destruction of people's consciousness of everything that is connected to a conscious perception of the beautiful." Andrei Tarkowski
For this young couple's residence, the desire for a subtle confrontation with the site was the most expensive and chased aspect. This confrontation occurs in both directions, not only in one direction, but parallel to the lot, due to the diagonal slope of the topography. Thus arises the figure of a regulating square, which expanding to the perpendicular line at the front of the lot, arrives at an axis at the diagonal of the contours, slowly loosening the house from the ground, setting the intimate area on the ground floor and creating columns on the lower floor.
The difficult context of the sensitive landscape, appropriate for its occupation, was articulated from that virtual square that orients the home for the best sunlight and views, seeking to not set walls, but without different uses, scales of different spaces.
We invert the logic of the sequence of succession of functions: social hall, living room, dining room, balcony, entertainment area; for an arrival on the axis that leads to the core of the house, the kitchen, in front of the balcony, the dining room to the right and the office to the left, integrating the collective life of the house as had been suggested by the owner, where he could see and be seen from the leisure and social areas.
Thus, the meaning is clear to the visitor and the everyday user, the house is open.
Starting from the clients' intelligent and open assumptions, we made an intimate area insinuated by changing high ceilings in almost every room and a rip that allows natural lighting and cross ventilation. This oblique tear articulates different functions that require natural lighting and ventilation, which is opposed to the necessary privacy and light control in bedrooms. Thus, it lights the couple's closet, lights and ventilates the daughter's suite and the office. Follows and passes through the covered balcony, and is the limit of the living room illuminating the dining room.
In this zigzag that turns the body of the house, we articulate a wooden deck that makes the transition from social functions to the leisure area, the ground, at the ground level, is now cut, now buried, working with embankments that end up in a swimming pool not yet built and then the small forest on an intermittent stream. It makes the boundary between the built and the natural assertive, with stone and concrete. So, standing on the ground, the subject can discern and contemplate the forest, or the grassland.
Therefore, in these moments of intimacy, in the successive descents into the ground, and in the horizontal landscape and the vast plateau, in the small mountain front, the subject makes his spaces, deciding which scale to seek according to the mood.
