House in Barrocal
Description
Going up slowly across the valley, we had finally reached what was left of an old house’s ruins. It stood up from afar as a small fortress wisely built on strategic high grounds.
We entered the ruin that, lacking its roof, seemed to us a perfect-sized patio. The surrounding landscape waved softly between hills and waterlines. Down in the valley the village’s church tower stood tall.
The essential in the house would go through this visual relationship with the far-off landmarks. Probably everything else came clear in that first visit, when we also made the decision to buy the land lot.
The house would be the space between the ruin’s walls – which would become a patio – and new walls we would raise around it in a rectangle attached to the rough terrain.
Highlighting its strategic quasi-military character, only the corners open up in variable relationships to the surrounding landscape. Walls rising from the ground hiding a white and bright interior.
On the way back, coming down the hill, the material palette was becoming clear: clay, lime, thick walls, domes and other ancient themes that we had never worked on together would come to shape this earthbound telluric architecture.
Datasheet
Algarve, Portugal
250 m2
ARX Portugal, Arquitectos lda.
José Mateus
Nuno Mateus
c/ Stefano Riva
Structures
Marco Caixa
Tecnical Instalations
Miguel Luz Marques
Gas/ Water and Sewage/ Acoustics systems
António Paiva Fernandes
