HOUSE PEDRO ALMEIDA

Project for a large house for permanent use by a large family, with five bedrooms, three living rooms, utility rooms, indoor swimming pool, games room and cinema room. The land where this house is located is rectangular in shape, is practically level and quite deep; it is flanked by a small house on the south side and by a factory building on the north, in an urban area, in transition between houses and factories, still rigidly defined by classic “zoning”. The initial idea for this project, which was developed in a preliminary study and presented to the client, consisted of a single rectangular volume of one floor, filled with “full” and “empty” spaces, where the “empty” spaces were outdoor spaces, sometimes covered at the limits of the volume, other times uncovered, creating patios inside the volume itself; It was a solution with intense spatial relationships that did not become viable due to the need to adapt the program to new demands. The evolution of the project allowed the same volume to be maintained, now with fewer “voids”, with a basement floor and a small extension of the initial volume, for a fifth bedroom, requested during the execution project phase. The interior spatial organization favored relationships with efficient solar exposure and with the surrounding area, with bedrooms facing east, protected at the front of the land by a wall of approximately 1.80 m, services to the north and living rooms to the south; the covered pool and the games room open to the west, in a direct relationship with the garden at the back, where a games field is planned to complete the complex. Since architecture is an integrative discipline, all themes contribute to the enrichment of the projects; This work was, for the entire project team, an example of how challenges, some structural, others circumstantial, can be reinterpreted.