Project Credits & Specs:
- Architects: fala
- Photographs: fala, Paulo Catrica, Lauren Ghinitoiu, Giulietta Margot, Frederico Martinho, Ivo Tavares
- Location: Porto, Portugal
- Area: 270 m2
- Year: 2020
Project Description:
In an artery connecting the city center to its suburbs, where individual houses are being demolished daily to leave place for bigger housing developments, conceiving a new individual house is a delicate task. The façades of the project stemmed from a rough conjugation of both building types, sitting in a fragile ambiguity. A rational order, following the logic of the plans, is superimposed with a set of seemingly inordinate elements: row windows, erratic marble frontons, seemingly arbitrary drainpipes, and pink marble discs unbalancing the composition. The house is an exercise in uniqueness as much as it is an exercise in banality.
The interior follows similar policies. An off-centered column functions as a hinge and divides each level into four equivalent quadrants. There are three levels and the street access is on the middle one. Fixed or flexible programs uniformly occupy these quadrants leaving the use to the user. The house is a static frame for the changing dynamics of life. Its central column is a condensing, symbolical element, a substratum of these dynamics. Its shape is arbitrary and exuberant, providing distinct perspectives to each room. A collection of blue doors interconnect different rooms and adorn the column like superhero capes.
On the lower level, undivided and open to the garden, the column levitates a few centimeters from the ground. The floor under it is therefore easy to clean, and the fragility of the entire structure is revealed. A house is always a mental construction before anything else.
The project description is provided by the architects.
About the Architects:
Fala Atelier is an architecture practice based in Porto, Portugal. Fala was founded in 2013 by three architects: Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, and Ahmed Belkhodja. Fala focuses on the production of both residential-scale architecture and oneiric competition proposals.
