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Architects: SIA arquitectura
- Area: 882 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Francisco Nogueira
Text description provided by the architects. The project of a house in Oeiras, on a hillside overlooking the Tagus River estuary, in a territory with no memory, places us in a location where everything is new, yet anonymous. In an urban fabric where identity remains elusive. For this non-place, we designed not from delicateness, but from the intensification of gesture, from an idea with enough expression to establish a new time.
This initial gesture was swift, an incision. A founding act in an uncharted territory, so that the street, the river-sea, come into existence. We sought the weight of the magnetic field of design to make it an identity. The house took shape and was built.
The proximity to the street and the view of the sea from the highest level led us to invert the program, placing the social spaces on the upper floor. A large and heavy floating platform protects privacy, preventing passersby from looking in, and concealing this communal space. The elevated, protected, and boundless living room seamlessly merges the indoor and outdoor spaces. A terrace suspended in emptiness, a cover between the sky and the sea.
We designed the house where the weight detaches from the ground with the almost insolent resistance of will. With massive, suspended, protective volumes. To find the right proportion of the concrete volumes, we turned to what we already knew and measured the consoles of the Gulbenkian Foundation. A tribute to the places that are common to us and that have shaped us as architects.
In this suspension, the house and the garden rise, the street recedes, and the river approaches the materialized border in a water plane. The horizontal concrete wall breaks the view of the street and connects to the view of the water and the sky. A void in the concrete platform allows the garden to pass through while protecting the privacy of the house. Soon, the garden and the house will merge in a continuous, uninterrupted space.
We extended the view and its projection onto the infinite horizon perpetually evoked by the sea, aiming for the project to amplify the place. A comprehensive and clean look, starting anew, reestablishing, as if we had never seen this territory before, as if we could unlearn what exists and design the new.
We would like the house to implant itself and become an origin. Like an artificial reef, with conditions for life to slowly grow and thrive. In a celebration of life, of people, of the heritage of Architecture, to make us all more capable. More capable of going on.
