Hasta La Ideas

Lisbon-based practice Extrastudio has converted a winery in southern Portugal into a family home by covering its walls with red-pigmented mortar, introducing light wells and adding a black-bottomed swimming pool.

The former winery was built by the client’s grandparents in the 20th century. After inheriting the building, they tasked Extrastudio to create a family residence on the site located in Azeitao, a small village in southern Portuguese city Setúbal.

An orange orchard in the back garden forced the architects to maintain the winery’s original footprint and overhaul the walls of the existing structure instead.

To maintain coherence between new and the old parts of the walls, the architects covered the building in a red-pigmented lime mortar. The application creates a rough texture, with patches of lighter and darker pigmentation.

“A natural red pigment was added to the mortar, to reinforce the building’s presence, allowing the house to age gradually and changing its tonality, without ever requiring a coat of paint,” said the studio.

“Over the days and months, the colour of the house alters, lighter or darker depending on the humidity, almost black when it rains,” it added.

The mortar also includes pozzolans – materials like powdered brick and heat-treated clay – which strengthen it and protect against weathering damage. Mortar also covers the wall fronting the property and the metal entrance gates feature a similar pinkish hue.

The winery has one corner that abuts neighbouring properties. This prevented the addition of new windows on these walls, so the architects cut a narrow courtyard into the corner to bring natural light into spaces at the rear of the house.

On the ground floor, the architects cut out a 14-metre-long window that faces the garden. It is fitted with black glass doors, which slide completely open to connect the combined living space with the gravelled back garden and orchard.

This is landscaped to include a patch of circular decking for outdoor dining made from building’s old timber roof structure.

A raised swimming pool built at the rear of the garden is placed into a gap between the orange trees and a plant-covered wall.

Inside, mirrors line the walls of the lounge to reflect flight, and pale concrete flooring and white-painted walls are used throughout. A series of voids introduced to the connect the ground and upper floor draw down light from the skylights.

The nine-metre-high entrance hall features a window into the yard at ground level, while another window set higher into the wall allows light to enter the first-floor corridor.

Bedrooms and bathrooms are placed on the first floor, which connects with a small attic room in the apex of the roof. Its walls, floors and ceiling are painted white, and the space is brightly illuminated by a series of rooflights and a pivoting porthole window.

Extrastudio was founded in Lisbon in 2003. Its previous projects include a delicatessen with a decorative perforated ceiling, which is also in Setúbal.

Setúbal is one of the cities bordering Portugal’s huge protected parkland, the Serra da Arrábida, where architect Eduardo Souto de Moura has completed a bright white house that contrasts the surrounding greenery.

Photography is by Fernando Guerra and Extrastudio.

Project credits:

Project team: João Caldeira Ferrão, João Costa Ribeiro, Madalena Atouguia, Daniela Freire, Maria João Oliveira, Sónia Oliveira, Tiago Pinhal, Rita Rodrigues
Landscape architecture: Oficina dos Jardins (Sónia Caldeira and Ines Bordado)
Consultants: PRPC Engenheiros lda (structural engineering, plumbing, gas, building physics and acoustics), Mário Andrade (electrical), Gonçalo de Meirelles (gas)

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The revival of great urban centres including New York, Los Angeles and London has caused unprecedented inequality and has led to the populism of Donald Trump, according to Richard Florida.

“I think this is the central crisis of capitalism,” Florida said in a video interview last week.

“A very small group of cities and metropolitan areas get the lion’s share of talent, the lion’s share of economic assets, of technology, finance, media and entertainment industries,” the writer and academic told reinvent.net.

“That is creating a gaping geographic inequality of the urban elite and the rest of the country. It is that gaping geographic inequality that gave us, quite terrifyingly, Donald Trump and Trumpist populism.”

Florida, whose seminal 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class provided a blueprint for the regeneration of decaying city cores, has released a follow-up that documents the negative side effects of urban renewal.

In the new book, called The New Urban Crisis, Florida argues that new models of urbanism that generate meaningful jobs and help raise living standards are required.

“We must break down the barriers separating rich from poor and rebuild the middle class by investing in infrastructure, building more housing, reforming zoning and tax laws, and developing a new national urban policy,” he argues.

Florida, an Italian-American, was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1957 and saw firsthand how the “functional, desirable city” fell into decline starting in the 1960s, in parallel with other cities around the world.

“The old urban crisis was really the crisis of the centre city, of people and jobs, companies moving to the suburbs,” he said. “The middle fell out of the centre city.”

Later though, he witnessed the beginnings of urban revival as creative people moved back into city centres and helped regenerate them – a phenomenon he documented in The Rise of the Creative Class.

“I would have never predicted the extent of the urban revival,” he said. “I could never have expected areas like the Mission district and parts of downtown San Fransisco to have this kind of urban revival on steroids.”

He added: “To see big towers rising on Hudson Yards [in Manhattan], to see Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Detroit… it really surprised me.”

However, since the publication of his groundbreaking book, Florida said he became aware the unwelcome side effects of this urban success, including the displacement of the urban poor to the suburbs, where services and opportunities are limited.

“Over the past decade I really became interested in the growing inequity of the urban revival,” he said. “Not just the inequity of our cities but the inequity of our geography broadly. And that’s what really motivated me to write this book about the new urban crisis.”

Today’s “winner-takes-all urbanism” is seeing the poor pushed out of city centres to the suburbs by wealthy incomers, Florida said, and a corresponding decline in middle-class neighbourhoods.

“If the old urban crisis was the decline of the middle class in cities, the new urban crisis is about the decline of the middle class across the board,” he said. “In the US in 1970 about 70 per cent of Americans lived in middle-class neighbourhoods. Today about 40 per cent do.”

Rising inequality is causing resentment among those who do not share the values or the successes of the urban elite, leading on one hand to the rise of xenophobic nationalism as represented by Donald Trump, but also to a backlash against tech companies such as Uber, which is blamed for putting taxi drivers out of business while exploiting its own workers, and giants such as Google and Facebook, which have been blamed for driving up property prices in San Francisco.

However, Florida argues that these tech companies, and in particular the “sharing economy” model they are facilitating, should be part of the solution to today’s urban problems, rather than part of the problem.

Whereas the agricultural revolution triggered massive efficiencies in food production and the industrial revolution did the same for the production of goods, cities are “one of the last bastions of inefficiency in our economy,” he argues.

“The lights are on, there are houses where people aren’t home, office buildings are empty, the cars are sitting empty, you have all these physical assets that aren’t used.”

Technology and the sharing economy can help remove these inefficiencies, argued Florida, who is co-founder and editor-at-large of urbanism website CityLab and a professor at New York University.

“There is a backlash against the sharing economy for causing our problems,” he said. “That puts the burden back on these companies to work to find a solution, to try to lessen these inequities and try to make our cities better and more inclusive places.”

“Maybe that’s the wake-up call we’re having today. Tech companies are going to have to be part of the solution.”

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