Architects:fala 171

Area:380m²

Year:2024

Photographs:Francisco Ascensão

Category:Houses

Design Team:Filipe Magalhães, Ana Luisa Soares, Ahmed Belkhodja, Lera Samovich, Joana Sendas, João Carlos Lopes, Martina Porcino

Contractor:Maxrenova

City:Porto

Country:Portugal

Text description provided by the architects. The new structure enters the existing building on its own terms. A row of thin metal poles carries an I-beam stretching from front to back. When needed, beams are interrupted. These cuts are exposed and celebrated. The new elements are painted in bright red and blue. They occupy positions within the space that are deliberately disruptive, blocking doors, windows and passages. Because of that inconvenience the structure becomes visible. It is an active participant of the space.

Besides the structure, the building required a few fragmented interventions. Within the interior space, very little was demolished, and a couple of strategic walls were added. Towards the street, the building acquired a reflective hat, towards the back a new translucent layer mitigates the question of insulation, offering an enclosed balcony on each level, and a new mask, made of glass, yellow frames, stripes of mirror, and marble.

The project is made with lines and surfaces, both approached in a way that is systematic but excessive. The existing spaces are reimagined with lines of wooden skirting, yellow frames, and dense metal mesh. Colours are let loose. Each room is disassembled into sides of white, light green, and dark blue paint. Mirrors are applied where the edges do not quite meet. Mistakes result in the multiplicity of reflective surfaces. The resulting space is abundant and complex, yet every room, fragment, or corner within the house follows the same logic. The fragmented project is taken apart in order to be reassembled with a different system, to suggest a different reading of an existing building.

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