IJUP08 - Universidade do Porto

Organic living | Weekend house in Castelo de Paiva
P. Geraldes Santos 1 , N. Brandão Costa 2
1 Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
1 Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, Portugal.
The present work appeared in the context of a bid of a project for a house in a rural area
near the river Douro, more precisely in the village of Castelo de Paiva, located in the north
of Portugal.
The opportunity of articulating the conception of a real project with a strong theoretical
background was unique in my academic experience, allowing practice and theory to
stimulate mutually and power a more solid development of the project.
As my goal was to idealize a house for a specific client in a specific place, the research
swung from the exploration of the essence of the phenomenology of the spaces and their
link to our mind, thus having studied authors like Gaston Bachelard [1] or Juhani
Pallasmaa [2], to the concern to create a mass that relates strongly with the landscape and
the surrounding buildings. Álvaro Siza and Alvar Aalto were very important references on
this last approach. All this process was supported by the execution of models that allowed
a progressive critical stand to the different solutions and a more mature development of the
proposal.
The results obtained are condensed in the specific form of the house (Fig. 1), in the way
how spaces connect or disconnect, how old and new cohabit in the same place and how our
body is induced to move through the different spaces.
Among countless aspects, the opportunity of articulating a practical work with a strong
theoretical support in one unique exercise made me realize that, in general, contemporary
architecture privileges the sense of the sight and disregards the intimate relation between
form and body. To establish more empathy between inhabitant and construction, it is
crucial that our body is regarded as the central mass in the conception of all the habitable
areas, assuming that the movement that we make between spaces is as important as the
experience of sitting or lying down. The dynamism of moving gives us the real perception
of the whole. In this way, senses play a central role because they allow us to feel the
different intensities of the textures, forms or light.
Fig. 1 – Model of the site with the proposal
References:
[1] Bachelard, Gaston (1998), A Poética do Espaço, Martins Fontes, São Paulo.
[2] Pallasmaa, Juhani (2006), Los Ojos de la Piel, Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona.
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