Project description by Orgânica Arquitectura
Against the "new", we rely on principles that have been repeated throughout time. They are a common ground, vernacular or popular. This is not revivalism or postponing the present; it is rather to bring out an innate sensibility and, above all, to imagine a house that had always been there, that is, in a union between the natural form of the place and the constructed form of the house.
It is a plain house, located in a coastal area in the western Algarve, in Lagoa, Caramujeira, and was imagined with the idea of intimacy and, at the same time, openness to the landscape. It sits on a horizontal upper platform, the main ground and limit of the house, where life occurs. The domestic spaces follow the limit of the parcel, precisely, the most favorable corner to the southern sun, sheltered from the wind, which in the afternoon rises from the sea.
Casa do Loureiro by Orgânica Arquitectura. Photograph by José Campos.
Its occupation resumes to a narrow strip in the shape of an "L", while the vertical profile of the elevation crops the sky, which is the result of the different volumes of the interior spaces.- kitchen, rooms and bedrooms. In a process of additive succession and progressive discovery, each space is distinguished and individualized with ceilings of different geometries and floors with different games.
The narrow width of the house prefigures a kind of an inhabited "wall".- the walls have thickness; the windows select the views, and are the eyes of the house, with the shutters opened; the square kitchen in the corner signals its centralizing power; the shapes of the ceilings enliven the eye, and the layout of the tiles match the uncertainty of the footsteps through the house; the chimneys reveal a particular pride.
Casa do Loureiro by Orgânica Arquitectura. Photograph by José Campos.
One lives outside, and this influenced the interior dimensions, which are neither more nor less than sufficient.
At a distance, from the podium and the roof terrace, the house looks the sea seeking for joy and optimism. The sun, the countryside, the colors, the ocher of the earth, and the blue of the sky, are in these restless times a balm of fantasy and esthesia.
