Labyrinth & Butterfly

    Experimenta Design Exhibit “A Casa Portuguesa”

    2005

    Moita, Lisbon, Portugal

A group of architects was asked to create a single family house each in the suburbs of Moita, south of Lisbon, as part of the Experimenta Design biennial in Lisbon 2005. The level of introspective experimentation had reached the proper level. Reaching in to find peace, comfort, and timelessness. Willingness to vacuum. The capacity to carve out a route for oneself.

Somehow the suburbia allure in the early decade of the XXI century with all the technological propositions and facilities at ease to humans made a desire and recollection echo most clearly transcribed in Kafka's short story The Lair, where the obsession with the safety of food inside the premises of what we understand to be the carved hub and nesthouse of some sort of animal, makes the maze and haze of corridors and safe rooms a mirror of the mind of the inhabitant. The suburbs.
As also in Julio Cortazar's short story A House Taken Over, where something takes over the different rooms, closing them, from the back of the house to the front making it increasingly difficult then impossible for the residents to use the house, in the end having to flee.
This ebb and flow of makings, attributes and uses in the house, mainly served and guided by a mental desideratio, makes the narrative of life within the built space an eternal flow of the Rule of Thought, in between the blood and the stone, the skin and the earth. From Cardo to Decumano, from the center of the planet to all higher constellations.

Client

Experimenta Design

Project Leader

Bernardo Rodrigues

Status

Project

Collaborators

Luís Ribeiro da Silva

Olívia Antunes