Tetris House
José Mateus

Writing about a house I have never seen in person seemed a strange proposition at first. Even the extraordinary photographs by the Guerra brothers are no substitute for the experience of an actual visit, of being inside the building, immersed in its architecture; they are no substitute for experiencing the light, the proportions, the textures, the passage of time, the cold and the heat.

Drawings and images can never fully convey the way in which the architecture reacts and adds to the circumstances of a location, a brief, the life and aspirations of a family. This is an elementary observation for an architect, and in any other circumstances I would have politely turned down the invitation.

Nevertheless, perhaps because I have always harboured a great admiration for modern Brazilian architecture, the teachings of which have taught me to become a better architect myself, perhaps as a result of the fascination inspired in me by São Paulo, a city I have visited multiple times, or perhaps driven by my deep curiosity for the career of Márcio Kogan, I fortunately decided to accept.

I often say that I do not believe in an architecture of powerful concepts at the expense of habitability. There is no shortage of examples of this kind of architecture, popularised by a press thirsty for strong, compelling images. However, the Tetris house demonstrates the architect’s great maturity, revealing an architecture of great clarity, in which I can imagine a comfortable, sophisticated and happy life.

The design strategy rests on a great portico in the shape of an inverted “U” which protects and shelters a fluid interior, closed where appropriate for reasons of privacy, built from wood. However, the boundaries drawn by the wood are not opaque, unfurling into a series of narrow openings allowing a certain degree of permeability.

Indoors and out are naturally interconnected, with a clear complementarity between indoor life and the garden/swimming pool. To achieve this effect, the architect uses a long wooden deck reaching into the garden, which gives the impression of having been taken from inside the house. The boundary between the interior and the exterior is radically dematerialised by glass walls featuring elegant frames in a minimal design.

I can easily imagine a family and friends in the midst of a lively party on a warm São Paulo evening, gliding freely among the succession of spaces between the garden and the covered terrace. Ultimately, this is another key feature of the project: the generous manner in which space opens itself up to the house’s inhabitants.

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.