"GRP. Habitação unifamiliar"
Residential - 2021

Location. Laje, Vila verde
Size. 720 M2
Collaboration. Fernando U. Ferrão, architect; José Lima Barbosa, architect (co-authorship); Bracara Projectos - Gabinete de Engenharia e Arquitectura, Lda; Joaquim Peixoto Azevedo & Filhos, Lda
​Type. Private comission
Status. Built

​
A house made up of boxes within its structure

The “GRP house” was built on a long plot of land, trapezoidal in shape and with two street fronts to the east and west side. This land resulted from the demolition of a pre-existing house and by the joining of several unified urban articles, and has a difference in levels of about one floor from street to street.

The proposed house has a “U” shape, which was composed of two volumes. The first was the house itself, which contains an extensive program divided into two floors, which will be described below, and which was implanted on the longest side of the land and next to its north front, in a volume of about 50 meters in length.

The housing volume and its program were briefly described. On the first floor are the main spaces of the house, whether these are the laundry, kitchen, living rooms, entrance hall and bedrooms, and also a staircase that connects this floor with the lower one. On the ground floor there is a program of spaces that complement the house, such as a service area, consisting of a kitchen, a service room, as well as a warehouse/workshop space. There is also a social area which is a common room to receive the family on commemorative days, and more, an office and the garage of the house.

The way in which the house was built conditioned the internal organization of the house and allowed most of the divisions that make up the house to face the garden and the south quadrant, that is, the sun for most of the day.

The second proposed volumetry, lower and with a secondary character and in the shape of an “L” served to locate, under its cover, a place for car parking outside, an area for drying clothes outside, the changing rooms and spaces to support the pool and finally an exterior route that connects the pool area with the first floor of the house, which is the main floor of the house. This volume generally served to finish off and regularize the land on the south side, on its boundary with the neighbor, in order to cut off the visibility to the interior of the house and provide the house with a new elevation as a careful landscape for the new house.

The result, as mentioned, is a “u-shaped” house, in which there was a concern to design covered and uncovered exterior routes, which could be covered by a person with conditioned mobility, in all the extension of these routes and to have access to most of the divisions of the house from the outside (as well as from the inside), and on both floors.

In short, conceptually, the project first intended to value the presence and the isolated gesture that constituted the implantation of a housing building with that extension and configuration. Then, in complementarity, a second volume was added that was understood as secondary and that finished the south front of the land with the surroundings, thus defining a new elevation and nearby landscape, which together allowed to centralize the territory of the garden and the location of the pool.
​
To reinforce this intention, an architectural language was used that highlights the structure in plain sight and in rough, which served to regularly pace the elevations and the interior of the building, to create games of light and shadow, to promote covered external paths; and also to explore and differentiate the existence of volumes or “boxes” inside the structure, whether covered in wooden slats or in exposed concrete