Half Dose #24: House in Brejos de Azeitao

This house in Brejos de Azeitao, Setubal, Portugal by Aires Mateus is a renovation of an ancient winery, of which the architects acknowledge the wide space and thick walls as its main attributes.


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Within this wide space, the duo appears to have achieved the impossible, as the volumes for the private rooms above seem to teeter on the edge, ready to fall into the more public, social spaces below.


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The plan and section below illustrate the thick walls, the perimeter circulation, and the projecting boxes.


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This design is an extremely original way of looking at the house, especially the public and private realms of this building type. One (private boxes above) creates the other (public/social space below), both contained within the historical walls of the winery. But how important is this container to the design? If the house were completely new construction, might it approach something like Shigeru Ban's Naked House, a semi-inversion of this design with the added feature of movable boxes containing the separate private rooms?


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In this case, the architects seem to have exploited the qualities of the original, creating a tension between old and new that finds its parallel in the tension between public and private.

[More images are available on the architect's website. Also see my weekly dose on their design for Nova Rectory at the New University of Lisbon.]