Reading the plans gives a further sense of the architects playing with tradition, inversion and ambiguity. Weathered walls abut the gleaming, glacial new addition The intermediate level houses the guest bedroom and bathroom the top floor, a library. Other rooms are distributed more freely, as volumes that spiral along the exterior walls surrounding and defining a large, slightly Piranesian, central triple-height void. Family life unfolds horizontally through the kitchen, dining and living space, which opens to the garden and to the landscape through a large window. Organisationally, the interior places the three family bedrooms at the lower level, each served by a small courtyard. There are two entrances: more dramatically through the street front into the intermediate level of the void space or from a side street through the garden, directly to the main living floor. Sited on an irregular plot in Alcobaça, steeply sloped toward the river Baça, this is a 475sqm building arranged over three floors, extending the existing structure to the side at the lower level, set in a walled garden. The house and its white-walled garden make a distinctive but understated addition to the urban ensemble And it is this whitewash − that covers pretty much everything but the lawn − that is the most striking feature of the house.
#Aires mateus house plan drawing windows#
The walls are chiselled, the windows and doors are enclosed, and both rendered in tin-coated plaster painted white’.
Aires Mateus have described this as a first moment of ‘crystallisation of a memory, where all elements kept from the existing house are treated to have the same look and texture. In view of its ruined state, the practice ruled out refurbishment and instead conceived of treating the existing condition as a void, limited by four walls. So, they contend, it is the scale of the construction that was to be protected and not its language, material or colour. But as the project developed they decided that their notion of heritage was not about fabric but about scale, about the typical urban legacy of the city’s historic centre. When Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus were commissioned to design this house, their initial intention was to renovate the existing structure. They are the sole visible elements, painted in radiant white.Īll images © João Guimarães unless otherwise stated.Transmuted into a spectral abstraction of its former self, a ruined house in Alcobaça comes back from the dead
The house uses the terrain to cast a dome that covers the social areas and is the life centre of the house.Īmid a wide natural landscape, the scale of the house is that of the patios and superior dome.
The house covers a total of 174-square-metre area and features generous terraces and outdoor spaces. It uses the terrain to cast a dome that covers the social areas and is the life centre of the house.Īn inverted dome intersects it and creates an opening that lights the space, shaping its precise geometry and limits. Situated on the boundless extents of the Alqueva lake, the house requires a centre: a protected courtyard embracing the water. Named House in Monsaraz, through its green roof, a visitor approaching from upper level don't see the house, but a visitor, coming from a different angle, the visitor see the corner point of the house that makes an introverted dome. Lisbon-based architecture architecture firm Aires Mateus has built a concrete house that acts like an extension of the landscape in Portugal.