House in Santa Isabel

The site is accessed through a garage gate of an ordinary residential building in Santa Isabel, in the Campo de Ourique neighbourhood. These two houses are very unusual because they occupy the back of a building, thus making use of the interior of a block. With a single storey, they were built entirely in reinforced concrete and organised through a number of courtyards. The constructed volumes contrast with the outdoor vegetation and the noisy façades of the buildings in the background. The plasticity of the materials, typical of Ricardo Bak Gordon’s work, underpins the idea of an urban collage. The ensemble was the subject of a video by the artist João Onofre, who represented Portugal at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010 as part of the “No Place Like” exhibition, which shows the seemingly impossible task of placing a 9-metre sailboat inside the swimming pool of one of the houses.