house in Azeitão

"To make a house, you take a handful of air and you hold it in with some walls." This is the Nazarite proverb that Alberto Campo Baeza used to describe the work of Aires Mateus, the office of brothers Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus.But when the four walls already exist, they fill up the space with the lightness of air.

In the House in Azeitao, an old wine warehouse is rehabilitated into a residence. from the outside, the space flows seamlessly into the ground floor space that is almost made up of the communal space which is defined by 2 new walls parallel to the existing side walls of the building. Pure white boxes, as if by magic, teeter at the edge of the new walls floating precariously above the communal space. Of various sizes and relative heights, they look as if they were placed there by chance and frozen in an unstable equilibrium, breaking away slightly from the symmetry of the original building and the central axis defined by the new walls on the ground floor. Within these white boxes are the private areas which are accessible through flights of stairs hidden within the residual strips of space between the old and new walls.

Enbedded within the design of the house is a conscious play of the tension between public and private, old and new, space and void, inside and outside. And despite the insertion of new programme, the reading of the original building is respectfully maintained. The overall volume is defined by the existing gable elevations, the sides and the ptiched roof. In addition, the uninterrupted internal volume allows the eye to be led from the ground floor communal area up to the underside of the pitched roof, with the inverted roof trusses fully exposed, suggesting to the occupant what the building might have been.





Aires Mateus