Absence of display
Hans Ibelings

Suffice it to say that this is a freestanding volume containing three apartments and a communal roof terrace overlooking the Atlantic, above a commercial space on the ground floor and an underground car park.

The three units consist of west-facing living spaces with an ocean view, and bedrooms facing the small street to the east of the building. In between are the kitchens, the stairs and the elevator. An alley leads to the main entrance of the apartments; at the other side, a ramp gives access to the parking in the basement. The north and south elevations are mainly closed, while the east elevation is partially open, with deeply recessed windows to ensure privacy and to allow for small balconies. The west elevation is glazed, behind the same concrete grid as on the opposite side, offering a vertical framing of the horizontality of the oceanic panorama.

The upper storeys are set back, to scale the volume in its context. Similarly, the form is calibrated to be parallel to the street and the neighbouring building, without in any way reducing the verisimilitude of complete rectangularity.

This architecture intentionally lacks an interesting form, and comes almost without colour. There is no flaunting of exquisite materials, no suggestion of design virtuosity. The effect of this deliberate absence of display is paradoxical in a setting of fairly ordinary buildings. Surrounded by architectural unpretentiousness, this project stands out as supernormal, to adopt the powerful term of Naoto Fukasawa and Jasper Morrison. And exactly because of its supernormality, it manages to unveil the everyday charm of its neighbours, which suddenly appear to have an inconspicuous quality that otherwise may have gone unnoticed. This quality would most certainly have been eclipsed by any architecture that ostentatiously aimed at being exceptional. Conversely, this building can fully articulate its supernormality only because its surroundings are normal.

What is true for the exterior applies equally to the interior. The organization of the programme for each unit has a similar self-evidence as the external appearance. Neither interior nor exterior are conventional or standard, yet they both have a seemingly inescapable logic associated with the customary. This architecture not only suggests that nothing could be added or taken away without diminishing its beauty or logic; this also implies that these two categories overlap here. The beauty resides in the logic.

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The light box
Manuel Montenegro

Nicolau Nasoni, a Florentine painter-architect, dominated the mid-18th century cultural scene of Porto through his many interventions in the city and its surroundings. Among the palaces, churches, gardens, and villas, the largest of them all, in terms of the area to be transformed, was the restoration of the Quinta da Prelada, a walled estate with a surface area equivalent to that of the walled city itself. There, Nasoni designed gates, obelisks, fountains, gardens, a maze and the longest baroque axis in the Iberian peninsula, now severed by the city’s inner highway and with its first half now transformed into city streets. Half-way through this axis (where the growing city met with what was left of the estate), sat the abandoned half-built ambitious renovation of an earlier house.

Two and a half centuries later, the Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Porto, a five-century-old charity, tightly quartered in the city centre, and inheritor of the estate, decided to properly house and give public access to its archives by renovating the house and its immediate surroundings. António Leitão Barbosa, the architect commissioned with the difficult task of creating a new image for an old and mutilated building, inside an older, mutilated estate, now owned by an even older, respectable institution, carefully steered his team in interpreting the long history of the site and the specificities of the programme. The strategy was to carefully renovate what had withstood the test of time, accepting the difficult complex the house had become
after its many owners and uses. To mark its new function, and the definitive transition from private to public space, a new volume is posed in striking contrast with all the pre-existing elements. The materiality of the new volume addresses the centuries-long tradition of additions to the fabric of Porto, using the newest light material at hand – wood, slate, corrugated metal and now, glass – to expand the limits of the pre-existing space, creating an oversized lantern (another typical feature of the fabric of Porto) that shines from within the ruins to shed light on the several
histories that cross paths at this site: that of an institution that runs a programme, that of a building that provides a context and that of a specialised window-making company, which always lends a hand when designers need solutions for their ideas to shine.

Two Houses in Ponte de Lima
Miguel Cerquinho

The issue of housing, and in particular the single-family home, played a central role in the activity of Eduardo Souto de Moura for a considerable time. His work in shaping the domestic environment – adapting it to the conditions and variables dictated by brief, location and circumstance – has been a reference for several generations of architects.

I had the privilege of directly witnessing this work on three separate occasions. I have known Souto de Moura for many years, and have had the pleasure of living in three houses designed by him. In 1990, some friends and I challenged him to design a multi-family building in Rua do Teatro, Porto, in which I lived until 2002; in 2002, along with Rui Branco we built and lived in these two houses in Ponte de Lima, and since 2009 I have lived in one of his famous patio houses.

With the same initial brief, the two houses in Ponte de Lima were built on a plot with a very steep gradient, in complementary fashion. One, on the horizontal plane, appears to levitate, defying gravity; the other, as if it had already fallen, rests against the sloping terrain. With level sites available, the plots which give rise to this solution were suggested, to our surprise, by Souto de Moura himself. This choice was key to the materialisation of this unique project, so different to the dwellings which surround it.

The houses in Ponte de Lima were the first project to use Vitrocsa frames in Portugal, marking the beginning of a period of universally acknowledged architectural and commercial success.

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4 Memories + 1 Warning

(1) First visit

A unique experience, intense, so strong that even today it overshadows all the professional or leisure visits I’ve made to Braga Stadium: I went with Eduardo to see the dantesque quarry where he would locate his elegant football stadium! We entered from above and were greeted by an aggressive, emaciated, squalid pack that we scared off with a shower of stones. The huge pit of the quarry fell vertically, mossy, scored with strange ferruginous colours. Across the abyss, wrapped in a dense cloud promising guaranteed silicosis, the workers were sawing granite with the piercing whine of the mighty grinders, the men all white, powder-coated ghosts who looked more like bakers. The days of all those people, all those primitive shacks, all those machines were numbered: that hole, that copper lake, all this would disappear to give way to the boldness of a truly unimaginable project. Impressed, in the thick of the dust and over the noise, I said to Eduardo, amazed, “This looks like a scene from Kusturica!”

(2) “House for the rich”

I returned to this granite platform in my professional capacity to be filmed and interviewed by RTP, which was making a video about Eduardo Souto de Moura, who had directed them to me. I had in mind the unpleasant incident in the south of Spain at a meeting of Portuguese and Andalusian architects in which someone with responsibility on our side described Eduardo as an unimportant architect with too much prominence because his work was no more than “half a dozen houses for the rich”.

I stood behind my tripod, aiming my Cambo at the daunting hole, and facing the camera, I pointed my finger at the precipice and with conviction said, and it was recorded: “… this is where Eduardo will prove that he doesn’t only build houses for the rich”. And so he did!

(3) Funambulists

I enthusiastically followed the works at the stadium. I witnessed some fantastic moments. I have experienced many of Eduardo´s concerns. I remember that one day he called me saying that one of the walls of the quarry, subject like everything else to constant measurements, had shifted by several centimetres. This was a work of courage, stubbornness, dreaming. Of all the actions that I was able to witness, one was particularly memorable: the group of Italians who set up the cables that connect the two roofs of the stands. Funambulists, with precise gestures and bold “flights”. The skills of the South.

(4) Portugal vs Italy

It’s raining. It’s raining a lot. I was in the “Quarry” with José Bernardo Távora to see Portugal vs Italy which, as usual, we lost. Looking south, I remembered with emotion Kusturica. Looking up, I saw the funambulists flying across the cables. That spectacular hole is also a little bit mine, because it’s imprinted in my memory.

Warning: this is a classified work; anything that defaces it is a crime.

Luís Ferreira Alves

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