Variations on Orange

Strangely enough
For a long time, our Orange House seemed quite strange to a lot of people.
Strange to us, as recent architects coming (or running) from the respectable and purist Porto Architectural School;
Strange to the patient owner who wished to have a beach house and got an urban one;
Strange to the local fishermen whose ancient lighthouse was partially hidden by the new rectangular volume;
Strange to the unpleasant neighbour who, from the other side of the street, kept a suspicious surveillance, facing the gaze of the “monster’s” only eye;
Strange to the brave structural designer who prayed that the almost eight metres balcony cantilever would not collapse;
Strange to the friendly visitors who never agreed why they liked that loud orange colour so much!
And yet, what was so strange became familiar after all.
Now finished, the house is also sallow and quiet when you see it from the inside - like an “inverted egg”, a kind of perversion of the normal building process: white concrete inside, colored plaster outside.
The proud structural designer is now using the long balcony as a case-study for his civil engineer university course;
The besieged neighbour has lost his “battle” and hasn’t been seen since (swallowed by the monster perhaps?)
The fishermen are already used to the strange shapes coming from the illuminated voids of the house at night;
The owner convinced his wife to move from the big city and stay for longer weekends;
And we?.. Well, we are now living in different cities but we are both teaching at the still respectable (but hopefully less purist) Porto Architectural School.
Times, as colours and as people, keep changing.
Nuno Grande

Hybrid Orange Strategies
At a certain moment, JLCG stated that orange was the new black. But maybe it is the new white? At least, orange certainly confuses the mythology of white as an equivalent of abstraction. But is orange less abstract? Painters would say no. Colour symbologists would say otherwise. Perhaps. Yet – apart from uncannily contextual reasons – orange is, after all, just as provocative and sexy a way to stress and mediate and promote what is not so obvious in contemporary production.
Think. What may, ultimately, no longer be so obvious to architectural functional “analphabets”? The emotional force of the cantilever, the ironic memoirs of French movie-auteurs, the twisting of reality/landscape to fit the artificial architectural frame, the impact of the pure gaze, the expression of viscerality. Gibberish, in fact. Aesthetic pleasure in reverse. Or maybe not.
After all “else” has become aestheticized: aesthetic pleasure certainly has to come with a twist. Maybe that pleasure is the anarchic pleasure of subverting rules – those which only those people who master the rules can truly achieve (Of course I solely mean those glorified engineers known as ”architects” as opposed to “builders”, but if an erudite example is required just remember that column that doesn’t reach the ground under bonjour tristesse)
If you produce the unnamable, then you get away with crime. If your cantilever – or your concept – doesn’t fit the categories that legislations find fit, than maybe you can just get away with it. And subversion saves your project from just being other object deformed and amalgamated by convention. Legal and otherwise.
The latest Pritzker Prize, Paulo Mendes, would say that you have to create problems in order to solve them.
Welcome problems.
Pedro Gadanho

WEEKEND RETREAT AT CARREÇO

Location: Rua da Velosa, 121, Carreço, Viana do Castelo, Portugal
Preliminary Design: 2000; Final Design: 2001
Construction: 2002-2005
Architecture: Nuno Grande (1966) and Pedro Gadanho (1968)
Collaborators: Rita Cantante, Cristina Silva, Mariana Martins, Matilde Seabra
Engineering: NEWTON, Consultores de Engenharia, LDA (Structural); ENGILIMA, Projectistas e Consultores, LDA (Water and Sewage Networks, Heating);
MCP, Técnicas de Instalação (Electrical Networks)
Landscape Design: Nuno Grande and Pedro Gadanho
Client: Mário and Arminda Barbosa
Contractors: José Meixedo Novo, LDA (Stage 1 – Structures);
Daniel Ramos Pereira, LDA (Stage 2 – Finishings)
Construction supervisor: Paulo Alves (ENGILIMA)
Final cost: 300.000 Euros; 1000 Euros/m2
Built area: 300 m2