This bright white house in Portugal by GSMM Architetti uses the trees on its hillside site to create a sense of intimacy, providing a counterbalance for the openness of its central courtyard (+ slideshow).
Miles away from the nearest town, the single-storey House in Quinta do Carvalheiro was designed by local studio GSMM Architetti as a quiet retreat that has as little impact on the landscape as possible.
“This is a holiday house; a place to renovate energy, to get close to the wild nature, to live in a different way. A place to be alone, for meditation or to be among friends,” architect Monica Margarido told Dezeen.
“Our translation was to design a house where spaces were defined by transparency and reflection of the landscape, to feel protected but at the same time to feel emerged into the forest,” she added.
Cork oak and pine trees surround the house and help to shade it from the sun. “The dense cork trees that surround the house provide intimacy,” said Margarido.
The house has a square plan with a courtyard at its centre, offering residents an uninterrupted view of the skies.
“You lay down on the patio and you dive among thousands of stars, in your transparent envelope,” explained architect Giorgia Conversi, who also worked on the project.
An expansive living area runs along the southern side of the house. Sliding glass panels line two walls, allowing the space to open out to both the courtyard and surroundings.
A fireplace separates the living area from the kitchen. There is also a sheltered terrace where residents can dine al fresco.
Two north-facing bedrooms sit on the opposite side of the courtyard, while a master suite and guest bedroom run along the eastern side of the house.
Here’s some text from the architect Giorgia Conversi:
House Quinta Do Carvalheiro, São Francisco da Serra, Portugal
A new presence in the light and shade of cork trees. Clean and sharp. I’m here. I’m here, but let me cross. Occupy a space without closing. Play changing face between the white presence and the absence of glass: let me cross from the shadows of branches and give back their image to the around gnarled trunks.
Quinta do Carvalheiro is another way of living. Enter and you’re still out. In the middle of the trees. In every point the look finds the way to project far away.
The walls are a pause between a glimpse and other. A border to cross, like all boundaries. A unit of measure for the space that extends around.
A challenge to the concept of “locked at home”. Within four walls. In ourselves. The house doesn’t obscure the view but reveals it. Doesn’t take away the other, doesn’t take away the sky. But is there.
The first day is alienation. The second you start to feel it, the Quinta: is of few words but is there. The third: you lay down on the patio and you dive among thousands of stars, in your transparent envelope. Protected but free. The fourth, you realize that you can change perspective. Look inside. And, as a game of mirrors, seek your hidden corner.
An open house, first of all, to mental disposition. Open to people who arrive, to changing light, to curious insects, to the moon peeping from the hill, to ideas, to the next new discovery.
The glass-walled living areas of this house in Paredes, Portugal, are sandwiched between a top floor wrapped in opaque panels and a basement clad in rugged shale tiles (+ slideshow).
Named 07CBE House, the building was designed by local architecture studio Spaceworkers to create a home for a young family, with communal living spaces separated from the bedrooms and service areas.
The architects based their response on the design of traditional barns that feature a monolithic base for threshing – the process of beating grain to separate it from the chaff. This informed a series of pillars supporting a roof that appears to hover above the landscape.
“In the region, most vernacular buildings that punctuate the landscape are barns supporting agricultural activities, which normally rise from the floor using a pillar structure to create a sense of lack of gravity,” architect Henrique Marques told Dezeen.
“It was this tripartition of a monolithic base, an empty space that turns out to be functional, and a constructed element that stands out in the landscape giving a sense of protection and at the same time structural weakness that fascinated us,” Marques added.
The monolithic structure at the base of the house contains functional facilities including a garage, laundry, storage room and a swimming pool.
This level is predominantly clad in black shale tiles with a raw texture that enhances the rugged and utilitarian aesthetic.
The tiles contrast with the warm ipe wood used to clad the decking, walls and ceiling around the pool, which creates a welcoming space intended as an extension of the interior.
Above the stone-clad base, glass walls reinforce the reference to the open threshing floors of local barns and allow for views into and out of the home’s main family rooms.
“The public floor of the house is exposed to the outside through the huge glass windows which, besides ventilation and light input, allow us to explore the ideas of lightness and structural weakness that we sought,” Marques added.
A living and dining area on this floor is separated from the kitchen by a wall of the ipe wood, which is also used for a section of the north facade to create a contrast between its seemingly natural fragility and the solid mass of the storey above it.
The top floor houses the main private spaces behind an opaque facade punctuated by a series of terraces that allow light to reach the interior.
A pronounced cantilever enhances the impression that the solid volume is floating weightlessly above the ground and reaches outwards to make the most of views from the terraces around its edges.
Insulating composite panels were used to clad the upper storey, creating a seamless surface in the space between the structural concrete beams.
A fireplace contained in a faceted wall creates a focal point between the living area and dining room. Vinyl flooring has been used throughout the interior, while the walls are clad in plasterboard that has been painted white.
The idea of a vernacular architecture (forgotten) and how it seeks to form a clear speech between the landscape and programmatic needs is something that we always admire.
A very successful example of this discourse, are the structures to support agriculture (normally function barns/granary), which in a more or less random would punctuate the countryside, as blocks of ephemeral appearance that levitated on the ground.
Generally, the proposal make reference to the tripartite elements vernacular, the Base, with a static image of monoblock and megalithic, which contain the functions of a nonpublic space, the open area, where are all the public spaces of the house, and that explores the visual and physical relationship with the outside, and finally the Block “gravity” where private spaces are located.
New York architect Louise Braverman has completed an arts centre in the Portuguese town of Botica dedicated to the work of abstract artist Nadir Afonso, who grew up nearby (+ slideshow).
The Centro de Artes Nadir Afonso was designed by Louise Braverman to reflect its location on the boundary between Botica and the surrounding countryside. Situated next to a major new motorway intersection on the outskirts of the town, the building is separated into two parts, with cultural facilities facing the road and exhibition spaces at the rear.
Glazed walls enclose the corner of the ground floor facing the busy road, offering a welcoming glimpse of an interior that features a photomural of the artist.
A cantilevered roof juts out above the entrance and shelters this corner of the centre, while a rectangular box projecting from the upper section of the facade frames a view through the building.
The ground floor space is filled with colourful furniture that complements enlarged versions of the artist’s sketches, arranged in a continuous band above the glass walls of the reception.
From the lobby, visitors can access a library, a cafeteria, a multi-purpose events room and ground floor exhibition halls at the rear of the building.
The ceiling above the library curves down to accommodate the banked seats of an auditorium above, which can be accessed via a staircase leading up to a balcony.
The portion of the centre containing the galleries is partly embedded in a steeply sloping hillside and is covered in a turfed roof featuring paving arranged to reflect the geometric patterns prevalent in Afonso’s art.
A short flight of steps provides access to the upper storey of centre from the roof garden, while a long staircase along one side of the building enables those passing to catch a glimpse of the art.
This staircase is flanked by a retaining wall constructed using stone salvaged during the site excavation, which can be seen from inside the galleries. These large chunks of stone were laid without mortar using a technique called cyclopean masonry.
“Since the exhibition walls are shorter than the exterior walls, visitors can view the art against a background of the surface of the rustic stone of the recycled cyclopean retaining walls, creating a unique feeling of viewing art within a lavish grotto,” said the architect.
The space between the exhibition halls and the retaining wall enables daylight to reach the interior, but minimises direct sunlight that could damage the artworks.
A gap between the two parts of the building at the base of the staircase can be used as an outdoor dining space for the cafeteria.
Louise Braverman Architect designs Centro de Artes Nadir Afonso, An Art Museum That Links an Emerging Urban Center with its Pastoral Environs
Merging architecture and landscape, the recently completed Centro de Artes Nadir Afonso links an emerging urban centre with its pastoral environs. The 20,000-square-foot single artist museum fuses a light, lucid contemporaneity with the rich materiality and sustainability of Portuguese design to honour one of Portugal’s most beloved native sons, the artist Nadir Afonso (1920-2013).
As well as paying homage to the artist, who formerly practiced architecture with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, the Centro, along with the artist’s foundation in nearby Chaves, will serve as an engine driving economic, cultural, and community development in the region. Sliced into a steep hillside, the new museum is divided into two distinct, but connected, parts: a light-filled cultural center looking out upon the intersection of a national highway and City Hall; and, nestled in the back, a vast, below-grade exhibition space topped by a green-roof park.
The Urban Face
In the double-height Entry Hall, a photomural of the artist and a continuous band of his sketches provide punches of bright colour visible from the street. From here, the exhibition hall, outdoor café, children’s library and stairway to the auditorium beckon, as does the exterior auditorium that is designed to encourage informal civic engagement.
The Pastoral Side
Embedded in the hillside below a sustainably planted green roof, the exhibition hall is the heart of the museum. Since the exhibition walls are shorter than the exterior walls, visitors can view the art against a background of the surface of the rustic stone of the recycled cyclopean retaining walls, creating a unique feeling of viewing art within a lavish grotto. While encouraging the perception of an indoor/outdoor layering of space, the proximity of the walls to the interior both blocks degrading direct sunlight and allows indirect daylight to reduce the museum’s carbon footprint. The green roof park, designed in the spirit of Nadir Alonso’s geometric patterns and the tradition of Roberto Burle Marx, also naturally modulates internal temperature while offering aesthetic delight to the community.
Architects: Louise Braverman, Architect Location: Rua Gomes Monteiro, Boticas, Portugal Architect in charge: Louise Braverman Design team: Artur Afonso, John Gillham, Yugi Hsiao, Jing Liu, Snow Liu, Medha Singh Area: 1858 sqm
Local architect: Paulo Pereira Almeida, Arq. Consulting architect: Artur Afonso, Arq. Landscape architect: Maria João Ferreira, Arq. Structural & plumbing engineer: JP Engenharia, Lda. Electrical and mechanical engineer: M &M Engenharia, Lda. Fire safety engineer: Palhas Lourenço, Eng.
Hinged panels discretely integrated into the facade of this house in Parede, Portugal, by Lisbon architect Humberto Conde protect the property when the owners are away. (+ slideshow).
Humberto Conde designed the family home for a narrow plot next to a three-storey property that informed the overall dimensions of the new building and the position of its street-facing elevation.
To the street, the house presents a minimal facade covered in cement panels and punctuated by narrow vertical windows. The hinged shutters fold down to conceal the windows, protecting the property at night and when the family is on holiday.
“The new building promotes a dialogue between the surrounding area by a language of contrast in its image and shape regarding all the spatial articulation principles that mark the adjacent building,” said Conde.
At ground-floor level, the entrance is shielded by a small boxy canopy, while the hinged shutters that conceal the kitchen and laundry can be folded upwards to admit natural light and views toward the street.
The gently sloping courtyard at the front of the house provides space for parking two cars, while a large patio at the back is surrounded by vegetation and incorporates a lap pool that is illuminated at night.
A long corridor leads from the entrance to the kitchen on the left and into the main living and dining area, which is connected to the garden by full-height sliding glass doors.
A staircase located to the right of the entrance ascends from the corridor to a first floor containing two bedrooms.
Next to the master bedroom is an antechamber between the dressing area and en suite bathroom, which contains a square, swivelling window.
This window looks out at a sculptural tree in a sheltered courtyard with frosted windows on either side, allowing light and ventilation to reach the bathrooms.
A door from the master bedroom provides access to a balcony overlooking the garden at the rear of the house, which projects over the patio below to shade the living spaces.
On the second floor is a third bedroom and doors that open onto a large roof terrace.
Similarly to the hinged panels on the house’s minimal front facade, these doors sit flush with a dark wall that gives the terrace a contrasting appearance to the rest of the white exterior.
The project aims to develop a single house located in the centre of Parede, Cascais, in a site characterised as Historical Urban Space. The lot of the house as a particular elongated and thin configuration like the adjacent lot on the left side – south. The nearby buildings are part of a summer houses morph-typological group that proliferated in the Portuguese coastline in the 40s, 50s and 60s.
These houses were usually built as second houses or summer residences, presenting, in general, a garden that involves them throughout their perimeter. The exception is made in smaller lots of recent date where it was usual the implantation of terraced houses, as a way to potentiate the opposite top sideband.
In this particular case, given the lot’s configuration and taking into account the adjacent house (with three floors above the ground and one basement), we believe that the new construction should certainly be marked out through these alignments, namely the build’s height, volumetry and the alignments of the main facade.
The new building should promote a dialogue between the surrounding area by a language of contrast in its image and shape regarding all the spatial articulation principles that mark the adjacent building – as well as by the used construction details, such as window openings, metric of the facades and visual relation with the exterior.
Safeguarding a small courtyard at the entrance of the house – access area to the parking lot and the house – that assures the alignments, the new building is developed in three floors above ground, freeing at the back (West), a green space which is in direct relation with the social spaces of the house.
Access / Outdoor Spaces
The building is focused on the alignments with the adjacent house, with a East/West orientation, which allows to free part of the lot at East as a reception and decompression space, providing an area for two parking spaces inside the lot.
There’s a longitudinal corridor, delimited by the contiguous lots’ walls, with the introduction of a single vegetable element – a tree – allowing the automobile and pedestrian access to the interior of the housing. It’s also considered the interest in maintaining the permeability of the soil by applying a large green surface at the back of the house. This will allow the infiltration of a significant percentage of rainwater and the optimisation of the access to the infrastructure network derived from extensions installed on the public road.
Functional Structure
The access to the interior of the house is made by a small and slightly inclined ramp, which is also use as a common distribution atrium of the automobile and pedestrian access.
At the ground floor level are the social spaces of the house. Through a central corridor, which serves as the house’s entrance hall, it’s made the distribution to the different spaces of the house. On the left side of the hallway are the kitchen and clothing treatment areas, accessed laterally. In front is the living room, a big space that establishes a close relationship with the exterior, through the use of a garden. Finally, on right side of the corridor are the staircases for the upper floors – the private spaces of the house.
Reaching the first floor through the distribution staircase, located on the right side of the house’s main access, we’ve got two bedrooms equipped with their own private bathroom and closet. Both bedrooms are naturally lit through the openings located on the East and West facades, having been also created a small outdoor garden to canalise natural light and ventilation of the bathrooms of both bedrooms.
The second floor consists on a single space – the third bedroom and a bathroom. Both spaces enjoy natural light and a strong relationship with a terrace facing the West, where a tree coming from the garden on the lower floor emerges.
Glowing red arches straddled bushes, pathways, fences and fountains in the gardens of the Portuguese presidential residence earlier this year, as part of an installation by Porto studio LIKEarchitects (+ slideshow).
Named Constell.ation, LIKEarchitects‘ month-long intervention comprised several clusters of slender arches, which were made by filling red corrugated tubes with LED lighting.
The clusters were scattered around the grounds of the Portuguese Presidential Residence in Lisbon, a building that now functions as a museum but whose gardens had not before been accessible to the general public.
“The project was in the centre of an exceptional moment in the history of the presidential museum, allowing visitors the opportunity to perambulate on the presidential gardens and offering an unusual experience of an illuminated marvellous world,” said Diogo Aguiar of LIKEarchitects.
The bowed forms resonated with arched openings on the facades of the surrounding palatial architecture. They emphasised existing routes around the grounds, but also helped to define new ones.
“The arch – a primordial element in architecture – has the inherent power to create space and, at the same time, to build a physical relation between two places,” said Aguiar.
The installation was in place from December through to January, so the red colour of the arches created an association with Christmas. It also helped the structures stand out against the greenery.
Portuguese studio LIKEarchitects designed an ephemeral lighting installation for the gardens of the Presidential Portuguese Republic Residence. The project, which intended to activate a space that usually is closed to general public, was in the centre of an exceptional moment in the history of the Presidential Museum, allowing visitors the opportunity to perambulate on the Presidential gardens and offering an unusual experience of an illuminated marvellous world.
The reinterpretation of lightning elements associated with Christmas, has found in the multiplication of lighting arches – which usually embrace the city streets – the opportunity to form an whole intervention composed with different moments, in different places, which intended to hold a continuous diffusion within the different levels of the classical garden, celebrating the Nativities without recurring to common places associated this special festivity.
Materialised by a network of contiguous arches in red corrugated tube, illuminated by a LED lighting system, Conste.llation delicately dances on the gardens, connecting spaces and crafting unexpected routes. The arch – a primordial element in architecture – has the inherent power to create space (under, inside, etc.), and, at the same time, to build a physical relation between two places (between, inside, etc.) being related also to the idea of connection and unification.
Implemented in little constellations, the arches construct diverse frameworks, creating illuminated frames fulfilled by the natural and edified surroundings. The proposal establishes relations between platforms in different levels, between the edified, the green bushes and the water from the fountains, giving a new sense of continuous temporality to the gardens of the Palace.
Willing to occupy the monumental scale of the presidential gardens, Constell.ation is a temporary intervention that builds on an ordinary material, taking it of from its the original context and transporting the visitors to an uncommon place, where temporary and eternal mix together, developing a new atmosphere where reality communicates with the feeling of a fantasy world.
Constell.ation is a gestural proposal that recurs to light as a vehicle to evoke a poetic visual language shaped by calligraphies and sketches in the landscape, which are noticed by the soft rhythms of the light nuances. Different parts of the gardens were invaded by an intense red colour that explores introspected moments within the garden, increasing visitors’ curiosity.
The red colour, of Christmas and also of the corrugated tube, gets relevance, even during the day, because of it complementarily with the green of the gardens, obtaining an enormous chromatic contrast, capable of enlarging the presence of the installation to the passers-by. The special moments created punctuate the history of the place and feature a global scale to the intervention, which is completely visible since Praça Afonso de Albuquerque.

Architects: LIKEarchitects Design team: Diogo Aguiar, João Jesus, Teresa Otto and Álvaro Villa, Tania Costa Coll Location: Portuguese Presidential Residence, Lisbon, Portugal Date: December 2013 – January 2014 Client: Museum of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic Main materials: corrugated tube
Portuguese studio CVDB Arquitectos has created a tapestry museum with vaulted ceilings, marble walls and funnel-shaped skylights inside a twelfth-century hospital building (photos by Fernando Guerra + slideshow).
The Tapestry Museum is located on the edge of a plaza in the small Portuguese town of Arraiolos, which is famed for the embroidered wool rugs and carpets that have been in production there since the Middle Ages.
CVDB Arquitectos planned the interior of the two-storey building so that galleries on both floors surround a double-height atrium with an arched ceiling.
Square windows offer views through into the galleries on the two long sides, while a single first-floor balcony at the far end offers a vantage point where visitors can survey the space.
A local marble combining shades of grey and white covers the atrium floor and continues through the rest of the ground-level spaces, occasionally wrapping up onto the walls.
“It’s a very local material,” architect Joana Barrelas told Dezeen. “Because we were refurbishing an existing building that is itself very noble, we wanted to use a material that has the same character.”
Vaulted ceilings added during the eighteenth century were retained and repaired in the galleries and multi-purpose spaces of this floor. Each have been painted white and feature decorative mouldings.
Marble staircase treads lead up from the atrium to the larger exhibition rooms on the top floor, where the floor surface switches to Brazilian oak that has been left unpainted to display natural yellow and pinkish hues.
“It’s a different noise as you walk over the first floor, rather than the ground floor,” added studio co-founder Diogo Burnay.
The roof and first-floor ceilings were completely restructured to create a series of funnel-shaped skylights, allowing light to filter evenly through each of the galleries.
Only one room maintains the old roof construction, which comprises a row of wooden trusses topped by a long narrow skylight.
Glazed doors reveal a first-floor terrace with a marble bench. From here, guests can look out over the town or down to a small courtyard just below.
The historic exterior of the building was restored and repainted, while a new staircase was added at the rear to allow tapestries to be easily transported in and out of the building.
The Tapestry Museum in Arraiolos occupies an existent building that once was Espírito Santo Hospital. The building is located in the main square of Arraiolos (Lima de Brito Square), a small town in Alentejo, Portugal. This public space streamlines the town’s social and cultural life. It gathers the Municipality and some commercial services. The Tapestry Museum contributes to consolidate the character of the square as qualified public space, in the urban tissue of Arraiolos.
The existent building congregates a diversity of interventions and transformations registered along its history. Some of its features needed to be preserved and integrated in the rehabilitation process. The project is based on the adaptation of a contemporary architectural language to the existent building, in order to guarantee a consistent exhibition path explaining the process of making Arraiolos’ Tapestries and their history.
The rehabilitation process was developed in compliance with functional programme requirements and technology demands. The programme is organised according to a central axis which contains the access and distribution areas. The central distribution space establishes the connection between the three main public areas of the building (temporary exhibition/multipurpose room on the ground floor; exhibition area on the first floor and education services on the ground floor).
This space is considered the core of the Tapestry Museum. The architectonic features of the space rely on its double-height and vaulted ceiling. The existence of window-like openings and passages allows a diversity of visual connections through the core to the surrounding areas.
In the ground floor of the building, the vaulted ceilings were preserved. In the multipurpose room the structural system was remade with metallic beams, according to a contemporary architectonic language.
The intervention in the first-floor ceilings was more comprehensive. All the roof area was replaced by a set of ceilings shaped as “inverted funnels” with a skylight on the top. The structure of the roof was maintained only in one room, characterised by a sequence of wood trusses topped by a long skylight.
There’s a new light over the old Espírito Santo Hospital, coming from the new Tapestry Museum, a building that enhances the cultural life of Arraiolos.
Location: Lima e Brito Square, Arraiolos, Portugal Architecture: CVDB Arquitectos – Cristina Veríssimo and Diogo Burnay with Tiago Filipe Santos Design team: Joana Barrelas, Rodolfo Reis, Ariadna Nieto, Ângelo Branquinho, Hugo Nascimento, Inês Carrapiço, José Maria Lavena, Laura Palma e Miguel Travesso.
Structure, foundations and services: AFA Consult Landscape: F&C Arquitectura Paisagista Rehabilitation consultant: Prof. Arq. José Aguiar Client: Câmara Municipal de Arraiolos Total cost: €1.000.000,00 Gross area: 1.200,00 sqm
A corner appears to have been sliced away from this hilltop house in Portugal by architect Manuel Aires Mateus (photos by Fernando Guerra + slideshow).
Manuel Aires Mateus – who alongside brother Francisco runs Lisbon studio Aires Mateus – teamed up with Ana Cravino and Inês Cordovil of fellow Lisbon office SIA Arquitectura to design House in Fontinha for a site outside the rural town of Melides.
Positioned at the peak of a hill, the two-storey house was conceived as a lookout point offering views out across the Fontinha Estate, but was also planned to offer the same seclusion as a typical courtyard residence.
“The house is designed in the balance between a courtyard house, with a protected core relating to the sky, and an opening to the distant ocean view,” said the architects.
The building occupies a cross-shaped footprint. Rooms are arranged around three quarters of the plan, while a rectangular terrace extends out from the middle and a swimming pool runs along one side.
The base of the structure is set into the ground, creating level entrances on both floors. “The topography is modelled, to protect it from the access road, and release the view,” said the architects.
Instead of rectilinear shapes, each block is also gently tapered to make the building appear larger than it actually is.
The sliced-off corner creates a partial arch on the lower level of the building and accommodates an entrance to a living room.
This curved shape reoccurs within the houses’s minimal white interior, in the arched ceiling that spans the stairwell.
The house contains three bedrooms, all located on the upper floor. The two smaller rooms sit bedside one another at the back, while the master bedroom is positioned beside the swimming pool and features its own marble-lined shower area.
The kitchen is also on this floor and features a worktop with a skylight overhead, as well as a triangular fireplace recessed into a corner.
Three pivoting glass doors open the spaces of this floor out to the terrace, offering residents the opportunity to survey the landscape.
Here’s a short description from Manuel Aires Mateus:
House in Fontinha
On the Grândola crest, the house is designed in the balance between a courtyard house, with a protected core relating to the sky, and an opening to the distant ocean view.
The topography is modelled, to protect it from the access road, and release the view. The perimeter delineates the internal lodgings and its transitions. High volumetric spaces, occupied by elements that define functions and atmospheres.
Location: Melides, Portugal Date of project: 2009-2011 Date of construction: 2012-2013
Architecture: Manuel Aires Mateus With: SIA arquitectura Collaborators: Ana Rita Martins Client: Nuno Correia de Sampaio Engineer: Betar | Promee | Campo d ́água Constructor: Mateus Frazão
Surface Area: 130 + 108 sqm Building Area: 160 + 130 sqm Site Area: 50000 sqm
Spanish architects Josemaria de Churtichaga and Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo have built themselves a rural retreat with wooden walls, projecting terraces, and a brilliant yellow door and chimney (+ slideshow).
Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo designed Four Seasons House for a gently sloping meadow approximately 100 kilometres north of Madrid, which had sat dormant since the architects purchased it 12 years earlier.
“After 12 years of contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west,” they explained.
The architects developed the design around a yellow colour palette in response to the hues of flowers, leaves, bark and lichen that they’ve spotted in the landscape across the changing seasons.
“This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams – a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow,” they said.
Part-buried in the hillside, the two-storey house was built from chunky wooden beams that slot around one another to create alternating corner joints.
The family living room sits at the centre of the upper-ground floor and opens out to terraces on two sides. The first cantilevers out to face distant mountains to the east, while the second projects westward towards a landscape of rocks and brambles.
Timber-lined bedrooms and study areas are located at the two ends and feature built-in desks and cupboards.
Wooden stairs lead down to the partially submerged lower floor, where an open-plan layout creates a space that can be used as a separate guesthouse.
Here’s a project description from Churtichaga + Quadra-Salcedo:
Four Seasons House
This is a humanised landscape of meadows, walls, ash, streams, a small-scale landscape, minimal, almost domestic, and where absolutely everything happens in yellow.
In spring poke all yellow flowers. In the summer, yellow cereal is yellow harvested in a yellow Castilian heat. Fall only comes here in yellow, millions of tiny ash leaves that die in a lingering and dry yellow. In winter, yellow insists in glowing flashes of yellow lichen on the gray trunks of ash trees. And here every machine is yellow, the signs are yellow, everywhere yellows…
We bought a meadow in this landscape 15 years ago, and after 12 years of yellow contemplation, we decided to build a tiny house there, a refuge, a piece of landscape as a frame, a small inhabited threshold with two views, east and west.
To the west, a nearby view of rocks, moss, brambles and ancient ash. And to the east, the distant dawn over the yellow mountains.
This double view and the thinking body finished to draw the house. Everything is small, everything is short, everything has a tiny scale. From outside, the view slides over the house.
The eye only stops at a yellow gate guarding the doorway, and a yellow chimney that warms it, the rest is invisible. And when sitting, stopping in the doorway, the house disappears and the world continues in yellow.
Location: Berrocal, Segovia, Castilla y León (España) Architects: Josemaria de Churtichaga, Cayetana de la Quadra-Salcedo Collaborator: Nathanael Lopez Contractor: Pablo Campoverde Area: 150 sqm
Portuguese architect Álvaro Fernandes Andrade has completed a training facility for Olympic-standard rowers where angular white volumes snake across a tiered landscape of grassy slopes and dry-stone walls (+ slideshow).
The Pocinho Centre for High Performance Rowing is located in Portugal’s Douro Valley, a wine region that is classified as a World Heritage Site, so Andrade designed a structure with most of its body buried underground.
The building is divided into three zones that each accommodate different activities. The first and largest section is the accommodation, which comprises a total of 130 dormitories that stagger down the hillside.
The other two sections are labelled as “social” and “training” and are housed within the white-rendered concrete blocks that jerk across the surface of the complex like a huge faceted serpent.
“The two more dynamic and productive major areas impose themselves on the landscape, spreading out along several different levels in large white, formally dissimilar and volumetrically complex structures,” said the architect.
The entrance to the complex sits within a sunken tunnel. This runs parallel with the rows of staggered dormitories, which are revealed above ground as descending roof terraces with long narrow skylights.
“Terraces and clusters of buildings, abrupt, tense connections tearing through terraces, steep ramps, and stairs between walls, usually in the open, are all covered here in order to meet the needs of the program,” said Andrade.
Communal areas where resident athletes can relax are located at the highest point of the hillside to allow views out over the scenic countryside, while training and workout areas are tucked away behind.
Currently the facility accommodates training for up to 130 people, but could be extended in the future to allow this number to increase to 220.
Here’s a project description written by Álvaro Fernandes Andrade and translated into English by Jed Barahal:
High Performance Rowing Centre, Pocinho, Foz Coa, Portugal
Memory
The guiding principles and strategies of the project for the Pocinho Centre for High Performance Rowing play their part in a dense and inextricable mixture that includes the peculiarities and identity of a pre-existing, specific “place”, the characteristics and demands of a very recent program, and the needs and wants of the architectural act.
If we fall back on references that are closest to us, such as Fernando Tavora (with whom I was lucky to have studied in my first year of college, the last year he taught at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto), along with all that Siza Vieira thought and said (a lot) and wrote (not a lot, but much better designed and engineered), we need to appreciate the various meanings contained within this “place”, in particular as a cultural “thing” and, most notably here, the landscape of the Douro River Valley as a World Heritage Site, and the specific ancestral expression of man’s intervention and transformation of the landscape.
For the demands of a very recent program, as is this case of a complex developed specifically for training and preparing high performance, Olympic level athletes, there is no or very little “historical precedent to put the words in the mouth of the president,” as Sting put it a few years ago. For architects, in general, this only makes the challenge of the project more exciting. This case was no different.
As regards the needs and wants of designing (as if architecture were not also a conscious act of will and innovation), they in turn also played out within “pre-existing” requisites (such as ensuring “Mobility and Accessibility for All”, and the essential values of “Sustainable Development”), and those that materialised during the design process, such as the problem of taking on a large program (8,000 m2/84 rooms/approx. 130 users), with the prospect of future expansion (up to 11,500m2/170 rooms/approx. 225 users) in a possible subsequent expansion phase of the housing area, without a significant impact on size and the landscape.
In the resulting complex interaction, the decision to structure the program in three fundamental components (Social Zone, Housing Zone and Training Zone) merges with the (re-)interpretation of two elements of secular construction of the Douro landscape: the ubiquitous terracing, a recurring form of “inhabiting” this markedly sloping valley (read here “inhabit ” as “extracting bread from the earth”), and the large white bulks of the buildings set in the landscape, in particular of the large wine-producing estates, formally complex and varying in size (often resulting from building over a long period of time, due to successive changes in the requirements of working the land).
Between them we find terraces and clusters of buildings (often between them and the river as well), abrupt, tense connections tearing through terraces, steep ramps, and stairs between walls, usually in the open, are covered here in order to meet the needs of the program.
But the choice of structuring/separating the program into three distinct zones is also a help in the effort to place the most-used zones on the same level, while minimising eventual movements between levels, something that surely will not be foreign to the history of physical and spatial transformation of this valley, which we are only trying to reinterpret.
The above is also an expression of the typical understanding of the history of architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto… not as an end in itself, but as one more element brought to the drawing board/computer, in coordination with other design problems.
Concurrently, the set of aforementioned options, accepted or adopted, allowed for a more organised coordination of the principles of passive management of the building’s energy. In the housing area, used for longer periods of time with less physical activity, the “skin” exposed to the elements has been limited , and the structures leant up against and dug into the ground (as the Eskimos do with their igloos). Rooftop greenery reinforces this insulation. Complementing the use of passive solar energy, the rooms have skylights facing south, in search of the sun, taking into account the general Northern exposure of the entire complex. The walls of the rooms, in naked concrete, reinforce simultaneously the meaning of “land”, “home”, of protection, of this component of the program, and allow for optimal storage of solar thermal energy captured through the skylights which, during the heat of the Douro summer, are shaded from the outside.
As a bonus, stars can be seen from the beds. And in conjunction with the necessary windows and welcome natural light in the halls leading to the rooms, we have made it possible that, from outside, the shale terraces and what covers them “float”, consciously rejecting any direct imitation. Even the irregularity of the plans of the housing area, rather than contributing to the “irony” of imitation, serves the relationship between a systematic and repetitive component of the program (the rooms cells), and the need for close proximity of these with other areas, whether for servicing the rooms themselves (kitchenettes, small social areas, laundry rooms for individual use, etc.) or for services such as machinery, equipment, storage, etc. This irregularity has a role in the interplay between repetition and identity, fragmenting the protracted spaces and long visually undifferentiated corridors, punctuating them with limits of perspective and unique spaces as they expand.
However, even considering the above, this combination of conditions and design options does not prevent the quantitatively most significant component of the program from being “diluted” into the land/landscape, and the future expansion of the desired number of rooms at the centre from being carried out without major disruptions to the general logic of the project (also because the whole project has been developed taking into account the prospect of maximum use of the land).
It may be added, in reference to this component of the program, that in spite of the limited size of the housing area, all of the rooms built at the level of the access hall can be used by athletes in wheelchairs. Just by removing and placing the supports in the bathrooms of these rooms, athletes with physical constraints may choose their rooms, and they can lodge in the same areas as the rest of their team, without having to be relegated to some convenient corner, in rooms “for the disabled”.
Having defined the structures and the contours of the land, the site and the programmatic component of “lodging”, the two other more dynamic and “productive” major areas (Social Zone and Training Zone), impose themselves on the landscape, spreading out along several different levels in large white, formally dissimilar and volumetrically complex structures.
Adopting a language and expressiveness of their own, and emerging as the most visible components of the project, they express the meaning of project and transformation, in contrast with the “shyness” of the terraces. Developed in conjunction with research on the characteristics and physical needs of each of the programmatic components, they emphasise the particularities of the relationship of these with the setting.
The communal areas for rest and relaxation take over the higher levels and look out over the countryside. Turning their backs to these are the training and workout areas, in an attempt to reflect the logic of effort and concentration that high performance athletes know so well.
Along with these particularities, they also foster different interactions with the previously outlined principles, in interdependent relationships of cause and effect. Formal complexity coordinates the development of a specific image with, for example, the freedom to control solar exposure through windows between summer and winter, or from east to west. In other words, the ostensible randomness of shape actually guarantees direct exposure to the winter sun through glass, as well as shade from the excruciating heat of summer. An effort was made to insure respect for the particularities of this system of construction, an element that is inseparable from questions of language that come into play. With a system of construction that includes facades and ventilated rooftops, double thermal insulation, and a system of “dry-wall construction”, we have attempted to equate questions of sustainable development, allowing, for example, for the disassembly and recycling of materials at the end of their life cycle.
An engaging and exciting challenge for the architect, the centre was also a challenge in investigation of the forms and processes of the integration of the specificity of “new” themes, such as accessibility and sustainability, which we seek to define, indefinitely, as… architecture. Only architecture. Without labels. Without adding labels that only lessen it, such as “environmental”, “green”, “accessible”, or “sustainable”. If there is anything missing from this work of architecture, it is those who, I think, architects really work for: the people who will use it.
Lisbon office Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos has designed a Jewish cultural centre in the historic heart of Trancoso, Portugal, with a sharp corner that bisects two narrow cobbled streets (+ slideshow).
Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos teamed up with Oficina Ideias em linha to develop the Center for Interpretation of Jewish Culture Isaac Cardoso on a derelict corner plot in the heart of the city’s densely packed medieval streets, which were once known as Trancoso’s Jewish quarter.
“Starting from a ruined allotment, the aim was to re-erect a building that reinforces the corner geometry, still displaying an acute angle on the intersection of two narrow streets, and establishing a symbolic gesture in the context of Jewish urban culture,” said the architects.
The building’s outer surfaces are covered in a seemingly haphazard arrangement of granite slabs, with narrow windows allowing restricted views of the interior and adding to a feeling of solidity that echoes the construction of its traditional neighbours.
An entrance on the building’s west facade leads to a lobby and a narrow corridor that encircles a central room called the Master Pit.
“The massive character of the building is also reflected on the interior design and ‘excavated’ spaces, like a sequence of voids sculpted from within a large stone monolith,” the architects explained.
The double-height room at the building’s core acts as the main religious space and is influenced by historic Jewish synagogues. It contains a raised platform with a lectern for readings and a nave with wooden shutters.
A long aperture high up on one wall allows people on the upper storey to look down into the worship space.
A geometric pattern of boxy skylights channel daylight into the central room, which is completely clad in panels of wooden strips that give the space a warm tone.
The wooden cladding features relief decoration that accentuates the height of the space and is also used on the nave to create the appearance of columns and an arch.
The pointed corner of the centre contains an exhibition room with a large, low window facing the street.
A projection room is tucked away at the rear of the building, while the upper storey is used as a women’s room and additional exhibition space. Bathrooms and technical facilities are contained in the basement.
Center for Interpretation of Jewish Culture Isaac Cardoso
Object
The Interpretation Center was plotted in the dense urban fabric of a medieval fortified village, in an area once referred as the Jewish quarter of Trancoso. Starting from a ruined allotment, the aim was to re-erect a building that reinforces the corner geometry, still displaying an acute angle on the intersection of two narrow streets, and establishing a symbolic gesture in the context of Jewish urban culture.
Altogether, the irregular granite slab stereotomy and tiny fenestrations define the elevation towards the two confining streets. The massive character of the building is also reflected on the interior design and “excavated” spaces, like a sequence of voids sculpted from within a large stone monolith. For the exception on this sense of mass, the building is provided with the existence of a large glazing which allows visibility over the Master Pit, a core that enhances all the Jewish culture symbolism with the presence of water.
The excavated granite mass, where the openings are also crafted with a special plastic approach, prevents overall perception of interior space from the outside, also controlling lighting, recreating and reinterpreting some of the most expressive features of Jewish Architecture in Beira Interior region.
The main room, which refers to the sacred space of the Sephardic Synagogue and the Synagogue of Tomar (also in Portugal) has the most obvious inspiration, rising in the stony mass of the building on all its height, filtering the sunlight to the inside through a ceiling where the complex geometry veils and shapes the perception of all sacred space. This area differs from the others not only for its size, but also for the lining of the vertical strained panelling in glazed wood, providing an inner atmosphere bathed in golden light. The religious space is dominated by the texture and the sense of rising by the wood cladding of the walls, giving it a temperature and a particular colour and smell.
Given the small size of the building, unique geometry and privileged location within the urban medieval tissue of Trancoso, the option pointed towards one outer shell is insulated and coated with granite slabs providing a ventilated façade solution. The structure of reinforced concrete column / slab, with walls filled with brick masonry is fully lined, on the inside, with walls and ceilings of acoustic control plasterboard.
Interior details
Environment
Outside paving and coatings have the same nature, made with regional granite slabs, keeping the colours and textures of the urban environment inside the fortified village and castle guard.
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