Project: Redondo House
Architects: Branco-DelRio Arquitectos
Project Team: João Branco, Paula del Río
Collaborators: Gerson Rei
Location: Coimbra, Portugal
Photographs: do mal o menos
Description by architect: The Redondo house is the last of a row of four buildings built at the beginning of the 20th century in the center of Coimbra. Its cylindrical shape responds to the oblique cross between two streets, and gives the building a certain singularity and its name.
The original organization in two independent houses: an apartment on the ground floor and a house with two floors and garret on the upper levels, was maintained. The original layouts were very fragmented: several small rooms around a large hall. Their high ceilings conferred the inside space a characteristic sense of verticality.
The intervention is based in 3+1 operations:
1. Through a series of precise cuts on the walls connecting the vertical ones, the horizontal space is introduced, whereas the original room proportions are kept readable on the ceilings. The resulting space is the sequence of the original ones, with its rhythms of windows, doors, details, lights and shadows.
2. All the infrastructures are integrated and hidden to maintain the original character of space. The result gives the feeling that nothing was done.
3. All the practical functions are solved with a series of free standing pieces: furniture. The reduced materiality of all these objects (built on oak and sucupira wood) give the whole a certain unity and balance.
+1. On the original garret, the elimination of a whole roof plane creates an uncovered patio. An ambiguous space between inside and outside, open and private, with a beautiful view of the city.
