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Both the effort to control the house’s privacy and the extraordinary depth to the walls contribute to this comfortable internal light quality.Ĭuts through the existing walls juxtapose the contemporary intervention with the original structure in the chessboard-like composition of openings typical of Aires Mateus, where rigorous geometry is matched by rigour in the construction. When the light needs to be dimmed, filter elements have been introduced, such as the patios that work as light-wells to the areas of the house away from the facade. So what you see from the outside acquires the expression of an archetypal tectonic, without ever losing sight of the clearly contemporary expression of the ensemble.Īnd what of the interior qualities of the house? Surprisingly, light is plentiful and well tempered, contrary to the glare you might expect from the reflective white surfaces. Using black and white not to distinguish between void or filled, but between served and servant spaces, the drawings coincide with the expression of an archaic construction system based on large, deep sustaining walls, and in the built form, where the depth of closets, or even small narrow rooms, are added to the wall membrane thickness to gain mass. Reading the plans gives a further sense of the architects playing with tradition, inversion and ambiguity. Weathered walls abut the gleaming, glacial new addition The intermediate level houses the guest bedroom and bathroom the top floor, a library. Other rooms are distributed more freely, as volumes that spiral along the exterior walls surrounding and defining a large, slightly Piranesian, central triple-height void. Family life unfolds horizontally through the kitchen, dining and living space, which opens to the garden and to the landscape through a large window. Organisationally, the interior places the three family bedrooms at the lower level, each served by a small courtyard. There are two entrances: more dramatically through the street front into the intermediate level of the void space or from a side street through the garden, directly to the main living floor. Sited on an irregular plot in Alcobaça, steeply sloped toward the river Baça, this is a 475sqm building arranged over three floors, extending the existing structure to the side at the lower level, set in a walled garden. The house and its white-walled garden make a distinctive but understated addition to the urban ensemble And it is this whitewash − that covers pretty much everything but the lawn − that is the most striking feature of the house.
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#Aires mateus house plan drawing windows
The walls are chiselled, the windows and doors are enclosed, and both rendered in tin-coated plaster painted white’. Aires Mateus have described this as a first moment of ‘crystallisation of a memory, where all elements kept from the existing house are treated to have the same look and texture. In view of its ruined state, the practice ruled out refurbishment and instead conceived of treating the existing condition as a void, limited by four walls. So, they contend, it is the scale of the construction that was to be protected and not its language, material or colour. But as the project developed they decided that their notion of heritage was not about fabric but about scale, about the typical urban legacy of the city’s historic centre.
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When Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus were commissioned to design this house, their initial intention was to renovate the existing structure. Transmuted into a spectral abstraction of its former self, a ruined house in Alcobaça comes back from the dead