house & garden for 2 artists in Serralves Park (Oporto)
Today we live no more the house: this is a shelter. We also do not live the working place: it is a passage point. Today we live the city.
Through this logic and, according to what the program
asked, it is necessary the creation of a shelter with which the occupying
artist identifies himself in a way even more temporary than with his home.
Therefore, and seeing that this is a changing territory, in which a new living
scale imposes, it is imperative to give a new scale to the concept of living to
reproduce and, reproduce the exterior world in the interior of the shelter:
bring the scale of the city to the interior of the house, giving it an exterior
aspect of more than two houses one house for two persons and a frontal
visual relation for a distant exterior.
The working space is the motto to the occupation of
the shelter, then, it is the starting point to the entrance in the house. For
the artist that will occupy one of these shelters, it is given the possibility to
have the relaxing space – living –
separated from the working space – working
– and, however, near this (like it should be in a city). In one of the shelters
that separation is created through the keeping of the living body in a higher plan, completely closed to the noises of
machines programmed to perform certain tasks, and smells coming from the working space; in the other shelter that
separation is made by the simple physical distancing between spaces, since that
shelter is a path.
The space immediately exterior to the common shelter gives the possibility of being a mutual working place, a reunion point for the two artists, just like the patio of a Japanese house it is to its inhabitants, but in this case that reproduction of the nature changes place with the house, passing the exterior to the interior and the interior to the exterior. This garden becomes a filter of the extra-walls world, it is in this space that the reproduction of the exterior world starts, or ends.
The space immediately exterior to the common shelter gives the possibility of being a mutual working place, a reunion point for the two artists, just like the patio of a Japanese house it is to its inhabitants, but in this case that reproduction of the nature changes place with the house, passing the exterior to the interior and the interior to the exterior. This garden becomes a filter of the extra-walls world, it is in this space that the reproduction of the exterior world starts, or ends.
