A group of two-storey houses cluster spontaneously on the north slope of a valley in Romeirão, near Ericeira. Most are situated in a way that volumetrically accentuates the landscape, establishing no other relation than that of an aggressive and inconsequential visibility. In expressive terms, these houses represent ambivalence scattered across the Portuguese landscape, a currently normative ambiguity that distortedly resorts to a supposed reference to popular architecture -a contradiction, since the primary characteristic of vernacular architecture is its reciprocal relationship with the landscape. However, there is now a counterpoint to this norm in Romeirão - the first, apart from a secular manor house on the opposite side of the valley. The house just completed by ARX Portugal (architects José Mateus and Nuno Mateus) is the first to lay the groundwork for such reciprocity and to investigate the issue of domestic space in this landscape.

The architects do not directly allude to the traditional values of architectural culture. Such values are implicit within a set of themes that sustain the duly filtered idea of the house and intersect with another larger, more abstract thematic sphere favoured by this firm's investigative projects. The resulting work entails a grasp of the contingent factors and a conceptualisation of the client's plan.

The project reacts very naturally to the physical and perceptual conditions of the site, responding with a single gesture: privileging the view over the valley, favouring its southern orientation and depriving the house of direct contact with the nearest buildings. The result is a long volume -”tubular” as the authors call it -whose form reacts with the topography, opposing the graded curves. At the northern extreme, the house is embedded in the ground, allowing for continuity of the profile between the hillside and the flat roof split into two planes which are nevertheless demarcated by the landscape through their pebble covering. At the southern extreme, the house is suspended over terraces in the most direct form of contact with the valley, framing a scope-like view over the valley from the interior.

The plan's formalisation generates complexity when the functional and spatial hierarchies of the interior are established. The house is reached by a patio functioning as an ochre-coloured filter, but also as an adjustment of scale -elucidating a classic distributive scheme (a division between social area and bedrooms). The irrefutable presence of a cistern and a walnut tree to the east, now hidden by the white volume of the house for anyone approaching, motivates the forking of the derivative tubular system. The discovery of these elements occurs essentially by passing though to the interior. With the fracturing of the initial volume, the spaces react moment by moment, theme by theme with great proximity and intimacy towards the elements of the landscape which are transported to the interior in a manner distinct from the monumental screen of the living room. A diversity of scales is generated - between narrow, and high or broad spaces with split-level ceilings - that construct a hierarchy and identity for each one. Thus, the living room “takes aim” at the valley, the main bedroom -the space that benefits most from the bifurcation - which is partially suspended, “takes aim at” the cistern. The central corridor in turn is finished off with a window that frames the walnut tree. These three pieces are the conceptual beacons of the house, which is formalised with a reduced palette of materials of which stone (limestone and granite) is utilised precisely to mark the strongest moments: the forking, the “ends” and the entrance.

In the last decades, one of the questions posed in architecture is precisely how to gauge the type of contribution single family homes make to the field. What began as an alternative to high-density cities of the 19th century - the “city” spread out into nature which it ideally tried to pin down and ended in a diffuse city- has acquired unimaginable proportions in the last 30 years. And if the problem can above all be connected to the (non-existent) organisation and (inefficient) management of the land, it is also bound up with the capacity of the of the construction itself -independently of scale or project - to generate generic qualities in the landscape. Certainly, houses are a highly specific and partial response, but a home's dimensions, that which really counts and has passed down through the centuries, is the cultural and not just the functional dimension. It is this dimension that is totally dilapidated in Portugal's contemporary landscape. Hence the importance of certain small-scale projects that are able to transcend their methodology and not their form.

The set of themes dealt with by projects of reference constitute paths to a general view of generic questions related to the land and landscape. This is in addition to the necessary typological and expressive quality expected of such themes in which the client plays a fundamental role. This tradition of quality was continued in such conceptually distinct projects and such diverse situations as those of Ruy Athouguia (1917), João Andreson (1920-1967), Fernando Távora (1923), Álvaro Siza (1933) and Eduardo Souto Moura (1952), or even the recent Secil Award attributed to Pedro Maurício Borges (1963), to cite just a few architects whose experience has included or includes home design. Today with architecture enjoying unprecedented exposure, sometimes also without criteria, this path seems even more difficult, more tortuous and burdened by oversights, which architects are partially responsible for. In this sense, ARX Portugal's Romeirão house immediately becomes a part of a group of projects whose capacity to generate high levels of quality by understanding what is essential is not exhausted through the seductive and competent fulfilment of a certain programme.

Text Ricardo Carvalho/ trans. Andrew Swearingen/ Mil folhas - Jornal Público

Specifications

The site's layout is marked by its rural character with farms , orchards, roads surrounded by handmade stone walls and scattered, jumbled homes. It is located on a steep slope cut through by a stream from which the mountains arise to complete the view. The upper half is inclined and the lower half is shaped by agricultural terraces. Two clearer points of reference mark the transition between the two and serve as a starting point for the project: a cistern and a walnut tree.

The first visits to the site would almost immediately suggest a body stretched out over the hillside. This is in opposition to the path of arrival which succeeds in sheltering the house from the eyes of the surrounding homes and directs the views of the interior towards the valley to the south.

The beauty of the land influenced the project and the house has developed an intimate relationship with the layout of the terrain: as it ascends it becomes more buried within it, becoming walkable terrain itself. As it descends, it detaches itself, accentuating the hillside.

Thus an elongated structure was designed, a line bent over itself, the cistern and the tree giving it shade. Between them a primordial space for outdoor activities is formed. Along the body of the house, patios are "excavated": intimate and tranquil spaces that the rather exposed location does not possess: the entrance, guest room and hallway patios. The extremities of the tubular form branch off differentially: the butt-end of the main bedroom is narrow and high, "observing" the valley towards the east; the broad and flattened end contains the living room and leans forward suspended over the valley towards the south. The bedrooms area is served by an austere corridor, with the peripheries characterised by opposing realities: to the north a sunken patio opens up, intimate and contained; at the opposite end a landscape of great depth opens up with the walnut tree in the foreground and a mountain in the distance.