The Casal Saloio de Outeiro de Polima is one of the few examples that document the first occupations of this territory. It is an old and humble rural house that has undergone successive changes and expansions over time until it is now transformed into a museum space.
Madalena House is located in Vila Nova de Gaia, in the parish of Madalena.
Composed of an overlapping of pure volumes, its arrangement corresponds to the desire of creating a visual barrier between living spaces and the street, allowing maximum privacy to be achieved.
Inserted in a subdivision located in Quinta da Portela, Coimbra, the land is situated in the middle of the hill. Developing a house in this location becomes a challenge due to the natural profile that the land develops.
As such, the project idea is not to land a volume that becomes a dwelling, but to design a volume that conveys the idea that it was carved in the “site” (thus creating the feeling of union with the place) at the same time as it provokes the sensation that it is the volume that holds the hill itself.
The project consists of a set of residential buildings with about 3300 m2 located in Cascais. The studios Aurora Arquitectos and FURO sign the architecture.
The site and the great height difference between the street fronts were the generating principle to create four volumes of semi-detached houses. Each of the eight houses is organized into three levels, with the middle level being the social floor. Conceptually, this floor is an open plan divided by functional volumes that house the kitchen, a bathroom, or a closet. The façade is completely glazed. The fluidity of the plan and the transparency of the façade are combined to give the perception of continuity between the interior floor and the landscaped exterior surface that covers the garage and is at the same level as this floor.
Aurora Arquitectos: Sérgio Antunes, Sofia Reis Couto, Tânia Sousa, Rui Baltazar, Ivo Lapa, Carolina Rocha, Bruno Pereira, Dora Jerbic, Anna Cavenago, Afonso Antunes, Ana Bento, Kasia Cichecka, Claudia Silveira
FURO Atelier Arquitectura: António Louro, José Castro Caldas, Paula Vargas
In Santa Marinha we had to make three entrances. I don’t remember doing anything like that, although that’s what we enjoy the most – drawing the entrance, and also drawing the terrain. And it is always the most difficult delivery.
This house confronts one of the most important arteries in the city – the National Road EN109.
Since it is designed for a residential use, the architectural piece is materialized in a uniform body which, through its shape and arrangement, protects itself from the busy road.
Located in Praia Verde, between the Ria Formosa Nature Park and the Castro Marim Marshland Nature Reserve, the property is home to an immense spontaneous pine forest, shaped by the winds brought by the sea. Sculptured pine trees stretch along the valley to the river that runs along the property’s southern edge.
The responsibility for intervening in a place with such mystique and beauty imposed the challenge of designing a house that follows the sensations, the textures, the light, the shadows, the materiality of the place.
A well-established urban residential area in the city of Santo Tirso – The intervention is inevitably a reflex response to this complex and challenging context. Urban plot, confined between neighbors and whose visible confrontations had little or nothing significant from the landscape point of view.
The pre-existence, heavily degraded and with little constructive value, lived in the typical and uninteresting duality between the street and the back courtyard. Moving away from this typology represents an attitude that is both logical and challenging, but above all, necessary and effective.
The architectural project for this house was born simultaneously from a void and from a dance: the unbuilt space of the patio separates and unites the two volumes that make up the intervention and that seem to want to communicate through a dance.
The house sought to create a relationship of dialogue, not only with the urban front in which it operates, but also with the immediate surroundings. Taking into account that this is an area in a process of constructive and use transformation, the basic premise was to design the building in relation to the pre-existing buildings, but also, and above all, to endow it with characteristics that would allow it to dialogue in the future with new neighboring constructions, something that was confirmed, since new contiguous buildings appeared in the meantime.