The presented project was originated from the transformation of a place that maintains its rural identity. The land presented two pre-existences: one building that faced the street and one threshing-floor built in stone that was implanted in the moment of the land’s torsion and quotes transition. The volume facing the street was demolished in order to guarantee the regulamentar distance towards the street and the threshing-floor house was demolished because it presented an advanced state of degradation. In the surroundings of the land, from the South towards the North, there were the exposed backyards neglected by the neighbours. Since the beginning, there was the need to recreate a place by working with its memory, resolving simultaneously the contacts of the new intervention with the surrounding buildings, putting together a perimeter closed in itself.

The form and its meaning

Taking advantage of its context there was the need to create a scenery for the house, withholding the neighborly backyards and aligning the two main volumes, thus creating one volume more public in dialogue with the farmer’s house. This first volume presents an independent access entrance to an office, allowing the work at home without invading a place that was made to be intimate. It also contains the kitchen on the lower floor and the parent’s suite on the upper floor. In the upper floor there are the children’s bedrooms. Both volumes are connected by a glass bridge thus allowing moments of space decompression and visual see-through with a guaranty of privacy.

The entrance was a central theme of the project that was raised through an inner-street connecting all terrain with a clear notion of course. In the first moment, a tunnel surrounds us and a wall of granite lead us to the house entrance, which is the (re)interpretation of the threshing-floor house that was in the same place and worked as a hinge moment between distinct quotes and land’s orientations. It was sought that this place of transition was both fuid and domestic. The access to the limit of the land by a ramp is made by a pergola that gives rhythm to the course and culminates in the leftover functions that equip the second garden at the high quote.

Contextualization of the building in the architectural context

A project’s house is the accomplishment of a dream which is to have a house to which we can relate. This process of decoding a dream wasn’t understood as a limitation to the creative freedom of the architects. On the contrary, it was understood as a combining course which lead to exquisite discoveries, including the authors while young professionals.

For us, architecture can’t be seen as wealth of quick consumption. The search for values that has something of immortal and everlasting like those who belong to the history of the place is the base of our architecture. This way there was the concerning of finding beauty in showing simple things, in a personal belief that architecture begins when the need ends. The search for beauty in the architecture is what it confers the everlasting character, not overvalued by the novelty, but always looking for a permanency value.