Casa Campo Lindo

Porto, Portugal

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Casa Campo Lindo

Porto, Portugal

Firm

Floret

Type

Residential › Private House

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2016

SIZE

3000 sqft - 5000 sqft

BUDGET

$100K - 500K

The location wasn´t the best. In the past, it could have been a bucolic hill, but now it's just a urban leftover, an irregular and massive granite rock. With this house we did not want to add any more noise to the surrounding, so it was better to turn to the inside and buried the house. However, the house was projected against a wall of regulations and when something is projected against a hard surface it tends to fragment. The municipality technicians were perplexed: where, after all, was the back wall? It was buried and this was a problem because we had to respect the alignments. Because of that, the house was raised a little to create an elevation that was alignable and for the project fit within the General Regulation of Urban Buildings. This sentence, ironically, came to prove providential because it allowed to save a good thousands of euros. Digging into hard rock is an onerous activity, we learn. In this case, the invisible hand of the regulations wrote right by tortuous lines. From the confrontation between architecture and regulation, another deformity resulted: the depth proposed for the building was not admissible. So, the house was split in two, that is, a main body and a functional extension in the backyard. It’s just an appendix connected to the main building by a gallery in concrete, glass and wood. When we process our project through the administrative machine, it has transformed into an entirely new object. Even so, we reclaimed the paternity of the creature. To compensate the client we planted a meadow on the roof: urban lifestyle on the ground floor, country living on the first floor.