ARX

The design of this house stems from a reflection on themes central to the identity of Lisbon's architecture, within a recurring plot typology measuring 6 metres wide by 15 metres deep, finished off by a small garden at the rear. It is a five-storey building with two radically different façades: the "public" one in white lioz limestone (the stone most widely used in Lisbon) and the rear one in glass, linked by an interior world of exposed concrete, punctuated by elements in birch wood.

The façade is clearly rooted in the Lisbon tradition, a connection reinforced by the rhythmic structure of the windows, set within a system of blind openings created by a series of horizontal courses and vertical bands, characteristic of the city's architecture. Like most of Lisbon's older buildings, it is a flat façade whose expression derives from its rhythmic nature and from the effects of light and shadow produced by the recesses of the surfaces that compose it. This device gives the façade a sense of time, expressed through the changing shadows over the course of the day, from a subtler morning register, without direct sun, to strongly contrasting shadows in the afternoon.

Beyond a clear concern to tie the façade to the surrounding alignments, the design displays an obvious contrast between the more opaque base and the more dematerialised crown. While the ground floor responds defensively to the narrowness of the street and to the fact that residents park their cars in front of doors and windows, the more permeable and dematerialised crown is a space that is at once interior and exterior: an upper patio that forms the transition between the lower building to the south and the taller one to the north. It is also a space that, despite its intimate character, opens the view over the surroundings and towards the distant statue of Cristo Rei, to the south, on the axis of the street.

The rear façade explores an extreme transparency that extends the interior outwards and opens up the field of vision over the garden, dominated by a splendid linden tree, directing the gaze from the upper floors over the hills of Lisbon, the Tagus and the south bank. As this side of the house is radically open to the exterior, the abundant light that falls directly on it in the morning is balanced by the fact that all the planes are built in grey concrete.

Inside, the precision of the spatial design, together with the inclusion of two doors in most rooms, gives the five small floors a strong sense of spaciousness and gives those who live there a clear sense of fluidity and freedom of movement. In terms of constructive research, this project is an example in which the entire structure shapes the space and becomes architecture in itself. In other words, the whole concrete structure, made up of just three planes (two party walls and one transverse blade), is exposed and conceived to define the essence of the house's space.

As a space that is at once natural and scenographic, for contemplation and for living, the garden is embraced as an archaeological universe, in which the various layers of time since the house was founded are present. Here one can perceive the old techniques used to build the thick stone walls (sometimes with stone reused from other buildings), the later layers of brick, mortar or paint, as well as the stones from the demolished house, which now form the paving.