Location: Cascais, Portugal
Architect: Eduardo Souto de Moura
Completed: 2008
11 Photographs
I have spent many days gazing out into the ocean on Europe and North Africa’s Atlantic coast and it always struck me as a vast exposed kind of ocean. When I look at it on a map that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but in Adelaide, when you look out to the ocean, it never felt that immense to me, despite the fact that the Great Southern Ocean surrounds an entire continent.
In 42 years, out of the 25 times the annual Pritzker Prize has been awarded to someone outside the United States, London or Japan, 2 of those recipients have been from not only the same town in Portugal, but effectively come from the same practice, with the offices of Souto de Moura sitting a floor below those of his mentor and previous boss, Álvaro Siza Viera, whose work was introduced to me by my old boss Kerry. I like the elemental quality of Souto de Moura’s buildings, they remind me of the raw concrete framed post slab buildings that I was surrounded by when I discovered his work while in Singapore. As my travels took me further abroad, I realised that the Mediterranean countries had a similar kind of thing, raw, sometimes unfinished, but beautiful in their simplicity. The Casa das Histórias is a very pure expression of that elemental simplicity, both in terms of the monolithic way it is built and the layout of the spaces. The red hue of the concrete pyramids, sitting within the crisp walled green garden, with the deep ‘bluebird’ sky providing the perfect counterpoint, like an advertising poster for RGB.
One of my great pleasures in life is taking friends to visit extraordinary places and it is the similar but different kind of pleasure when you visit with students, the questions are more informed, but less personal and the element of surprise is different. When you tell most people that that are going to see something amazing, they are sceptical, but architecture students have a special kind of optimism and the good ones at least are yearning for their minds to be opened. I liked this place as an explanatory example of how buildings can be radically different, while being intimately familiar.
As is often the case with buildings like this, we weren’t allowed to take photographs inside the galleries, which is a shame, as the spaces themselves, inverse of the pyramidal forms, have a wonderful quality of light from the apertures at the top.
I have always loved walled gardens and while I usually like something richer than a crisply mowed lawn, I wholeheartedly enjoyed lazing on the lawn within the walls while the students wandered about asking the occasional question. Later, after buying a striped pair of euro style short swimming trunks, a small group of us swum in the chilly vast Atlantic Ocean, then had a beer in the sun.
HWLK