basaltic lagoon

This project by Aires Mateus intends to evoke the architectural landscape of the Azores, drawing upon the form and material that embed the collective memory of this island and archipelago, that have become, with time, a second nature of this place. With this in mind, the Architects have made the buildings as archetypal volumes, simple and compact and clad with the local basaltic stone. This building asserts itself as the largest of the group to build around the lagoon. The buidling draws on an intermediate space between exterior and interior – the courtyard. This element results from a subtraction to the volume, cutting it from within the central zone to the exterior limit of a facade thus enabling access to the interior. This internal courtyard also becomes the point where the main internal compartments are revealed. The Architects conceived this building as a sculpture - a block of raw matter that is intentionally cut into to capture light and the lagoon itself.

The building for temporary accommodation is a compact volume of four fields compartmentalised into four units. The building is cut in each of the four facades by a wooden threshold that enables the penetration of light and access to each of the accommodation units. There is an established hierarchy of heights between the four spaces related to the solar orientation of each unit. The exterior wall of the building is structural where the necessary infrastructures and services run as oppose to the light interior timber walls.

homogenous roofs

This Aires Mateus project is a response to very specific conditions which is the recovery of existing wood-masonry buildings. The idea of providing a complex with a homogeneous unity under a sloping roof. The Architects design begins with the existing material conditions, depending on their inhabitation potential. After that, the brief suggests the renovation of the masonry buildings, adapting them for use as individual rooms, while one of the two wooden volumes is converted into a two-bedroom pavilion and the other is the pavilion for common areas. Observers would notice that the street entrance emerges through the sandy ground, which is used as a basis for all the constructions. This treated material is spread as paving inside the community pavilion, qualifying the domestic conditions with a sense of natural comfort. The textural continuity of powerful material like sand changes the scale of the interior spaces, making the act of inhabitation a unique poetic experience, fitting for the sort of experience sought for this place.