This project has a peculiar condition: between an industrial school and a cemetery, it gained an unexpected prominence, so much that, in 1942, Lisbon City Council intended its demolition. This was not to be, and so it remained: a collective housing building from the early 20th century, with a refined front façade, blind side façades and a utilitarian rear façade.
Our clients acquired the building to convert it into a house with an ambitious programme, and we added the desire to give a sense of integrity and context that would probably have been unfitting when it was built. We sought to react to each confrontation – street widening, verdant cemetery, garden, river – and articulate these reactions in a continuous movement around and through the house.
To do so, we demolished the building’s interior, the east and rear façades, and launched, from the front façade, a compositional programme that bends the building’s edges, transforming – purifying or saturating, attenuating or amplifying, the existing architectural and decorative elements – in a movement that we would call chronological. The rear façade continues to be the one that most literally expresses the building’s interior, which is organized around an atrium that changes shape in height.
As in other projects of ours, we pursed an idea, old and difficult, of a certain and inseparable relationship between the whole and the parts, including in the whole a space and time that extend beyond the limits of the house, and in the parts that which cannot be designed.
After a long meeting with the clients, Ana grabbed a sheet of paper with an image of the project and said this house could only be in Lisbon, but she had never seen anything like it – that’s the house we are looking for.
Team:
Architect: Camarim
Photography: Nelson Garrido
Team: Vasco Matias Correia, Patrícia Ferreira de Sousa, Sebastien Alfaiate, Joana Ramos
Material Used:
1. Structure: composite concrete slabs, in situ reinforced concrete, glue laminated timber, steel, stone masonry
2. Exterior Finishings: copper-coated zinc, dark-green wrought iron, engraved ceramic tiles, red terracotta flat roof tiles, replicas of traditional ceramic tiles, restored traditional ceramic tiles, warm-white mortar, white AMOP reconstituted stone, white vidraço stone
3. Interior Finishings: oak wood veneered HDF, plaster with aggregate and light-green pigment, restored traditional ceramic tiles, smooth white plaster, solid oak wood, solid sucupira wood, stainless steel, sucupira wood veneered HDF, white AMOP reconstituted stone, white Compac reconstituted stone, white lacquered HDF, white marble with black veins, white vidraço stone
4. VMZinc: Copper-coated zinc
5. CR Cerâmicas: Engraved ceramic tiles
6. CS Telhas: Red terracotta flat roof tiles
7. AMOP: White reconstituted stone
8. Richimi: Plaster with aggregate and light-green pigment
9. Rehau: Tilt & turn windows
10. Sosoares: Sliding monorail windows
