The House ASJS is located in Porto and the lot in which it is inserted has the typical characteristics of the city’s 19th century lots: rectangular shape, narrow and long. Therefore, the preservation of the original lineation of the street was preserved, as was the original façade, consequently.
Project: ASJS HOUSE
Studio: Pedro Mosca & Pedro Gonçalves Arquitectos, Lda.
Website: https://www.pmpg.pt/
Location: Porto, Portugal
Date: 2020
Area: 195 m2
Location: Porto, Portugal
Program: Housing
Design Team:
Pedro Mosca
Pedro Gonçalves
With the collaboration of Luísa Barreira Arch
CREDITS
Engineering: ASPP Engenheiros Associados
Cnostruction: Encore – Engenharia, Construção e Reabilitação
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS: José Campos
However, the rear façade reflects a bigger amount of liberty in the design, such that we used the neighbors’ buildings’ alignments as the guiding lines for the volumetry of the new façade.
Our intervention had as its main intentions the continuity and respect for the existing alignments of the preexisting building, the treatment of the new parts of the façade and the ampliation of a floor over the ground floor level and another one under the ground floor level.
On that account, the house turned out to be organized in three floors: the basement, elevated ground floor and the attic.
The entrance in the house is located on the Southside of the building, it is made through the canal that connects the street to the back yard, and in between the ground floor and the basement. In this manner, after descending half of a flight of stairs, on the basement’s level, we find the living room, a service bathroom, the laundry room, a service space and the kitchen – with a designated eating area -, which is in direct contact with the first level of the yard. On the ground floor there is a bedroom with an ensuite bathroom, one bathroom and another bedroom with a study area. On the last floor, the attic, there are two rooms, each one served by a balcony.
The back yard is divided in differentiated levels – in order to control the depth of the lot -, and it is composed by a garden space and a patio.
Moreover, we emphasize the necessity of bringing light into the basement level. With this challenge in view, we formulated a mechanism between the stairwell and its skylight, that brings light across all of the floors. Not only did this system allowed for the design of interior balcony spaces that illuminate the living room and the kitchen from above, but also for the creation of various visual connections between the stairwell and the social areas of the house. In this way, the stairwell becomes a route where we appear and disappear, it becomes a communication circuit.
