Architecture: Tiago do Vale Architects
Architecture Team: Tiago do Vale, María Cainzos Osinde, with Camile Martin, Eva Amor, Hugo Quintela, Joanna Jakimiuk, Esra Arslam
Project Year: 2014-2016
Program: Residential
Location: Ponte de Lima, Portugal
Client: Private
Engineering: Daengstudio L.da
Construction Year: 2016-2018
Footprint: 2713 ft2 (252 m2)
Construction Area: 2949 ft2 (274 m2)
Photography: João Morgado
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About Studio
“It is not completely wrong to say that there is a certain informality in the architecture of Tiago do Vale. There is a kind of rejection of schools, currents, or movements – even the modern, at least in a rationalized way. The style does not count, but the relationship between the work and life does.
This does not mean that the design of this office is light: quite the contrary, it is a design supported by deeply critical, discerning, and genuine responses to each circumstance, in responses more interested in appropriation, sensitivity, and continuity with the built culture, avoiding uncritical formal or conceptual limitations that impoverish the range of possibilities for the work. This is where the cohesion of this body of work comes from.
Following these principles, each project is a rehabilitation exercise: if there is a building, its merits, its history, its construction techniques, its values, and its physical context and culture become the foundation for the most surgical ( but transformative) intervention, allowing to prolong the history (which is intended to be continuous and linear) of the building towards the future; if we find an empty space, the emptiness is rehabilitated according to the exact same principles, trying to reach the exact same objectives.
Thus, this practice proposes, in reality, that architecture ceases to be a circularly self-referenced object, both in its design and in its thinking, and that it once again becomes a part and product of the culture in which it operates.”
This is a project of tense duality between vernacular principles and a neoplastic understating of shape, place, and landscape. In a naturally fragmented and disconnected context, the Gafarim House offers monolithic, opaque volumes to the street, citing the compact, parallelepipedic masses of northern Portuguese popular architecture and adjusting its scale to the surroundings.
It appears with autonomy in its context -an independent object among independent objects- and, in its economy of shape and detailing, it distances itself from the post-rural decorativism that is the norm in today’s Portuguese countryside. This exterior formal economy is contrasted with a generous, high-ceilinged, expansive interior space that incorporates the remote landscape.
The entrance is a long transitional moment and a space in itself. Evolving from the exterior, covered arrival space to its interior extension, from shadow to light, and from opaque to transparent, this progressive contrast is an important representation of the duplicities and contradictions that define the theme of the project.
After the compressed, conditioned entering movement the space expands to a double-height volume that houses the social program of the house, reuniting under a same roof kitchen, dining, and living room, citing the domestic organization of this region’s vernacular homes. This is a space of great transparency, relating through a generous glass wall with the plot and the wide Minho views.
In spite of its transparency, opening to the northeast allows for a controlled relationship with natural light. Bathing in the morning light reflected by the water mirror and backlit by the infiltrating afternoon sun descending from the mezzanine, the changing natural light animates the architecture throughout the day and throughout the year.
Without any explicit separation, the private section of the house develops autonomously, with all bedrooms faced towards the southeast. A small interior patio serves both the master bedroom and the bathrooms. This patio is a device that allows the creation of a space that, though formally inside of the house, is symbolically apart.
Between vernacular and contemporary references, between blind volumes and open planes, the Gafarim House is a project about contradiction, opposition, and provocation condensed in a simple, pragmatic structure.