The Physicist and The Work
António Belém Lima
Vila Real 17 October/2002
Casa Gomes and Casa Cristino are encapsulated in the Vila Campos housing development. A recent residential arredor. Here "bastard offspring" look out over the Marão hills, the Borbela pasture. They are already grandchildren of the modern discipline. Dumb inward-looking objects. They provide a cultured chorus to contemporary erudite withdrawal , from which they are distant. So it seems.
In fact, from the outset they constitute a physical accommodation, creating mechanisms, superimposing land registers on the plot's artificial land register. The high walls, ramps made from slabs, narrow stairs, solid steps, terrace-garages…are a micro-archaeology of paradoxical geometry, which delay entry. Nothing modern underfoot. Nothing post-modern in sight. This conceptualization of the context shall serve above all as a clinch with the architecture. Something ancestral.
But this semantic skill reveals contemporary thing after all. The trapezoidal Casa Gomes. Casa Cristino in the shape of a parallelepiped. Platonic volumes that become fragile in massive consoles (cG) or crush a long glass skirting board (cC). On the west, a double height veranda or a single façade look out over distant landscape as if these were offices. A rationale of utmost compression, a kind of frozen expressionism. "What you see is just what you see", Frank S. Sobreposta used to say of material manipulation (there are walls of cement lined with granite, there are impossible, delicate verandas...), this language of extremes gradually becomes an active contemporary landscape.
In the meantime, the Cannatà & Fernandes houses invests primarily in the most cryptic land, which is obviously the most resistant: the domestic interior. Here the "basement-ground floor-floor) is earth-outside-air. There are three piano-nobile; such is the energy corresponding to the floors, the excessive character of the space in the light of its common destiny. This abrupt wealth is also intensified by the vertiginous stairs. A marble floor leads to the rooms as if in a Venetian palace. In the middle, a brilliant, continuous living room, which does without doors or limits. Here the more or less kitsch nostalgia of domesticity is shattered.. Compensated by the scenario that the light and the black wood generate in a knowing confrontation. In spaces with long names. The high-parapet-veranda, the window-on-the-floor landing, the laundry-overlooking-the-wood, the stretch-kitchen, the sunbathed-baths… These all consuming spaces shall speak, acknowledging a re-making of autumnal rituals in real time.
Here the vernacular granite and the plaster are strange neighbours to long, polished panels of aluminium or glass. The sucupira wood and white marble spilt over the interiors do not come from the region. In this new ceremony and scale they rather seek perennial quintessence. The building project with its systematized care (woodwork, cupboards, articulations, movements…) adds nothing to this strategic desire. It just materializes the search for a new, more uncertain, more adapted permanence. The abstract vocation of modernity is transformed. The ethics of reductionism are combined with ambiguity. A kind of global regionalism is created, which again summors the ohysics of the oeuvre to affirm no longer an identity but only a presence.
The living machine is domesticated. Without a blemish on the outside. But magical on the inside.
"The taste of the apple… lies in the contact between this fruit and the palate, not in the fruit itself…"
Jorge Luís Borges in Preface of the Poetic Work
DIRECTOR
RUI BARREIROS DUARTE
EDITORIAL BOARD
EMANUEL MARANHA DAS NEVES
JOSÉ ANTÓNIO LAMEIRAS
EDITOR
LOJA DA IMAGEM
MARKTING, COMUNICAÇÃO E GESTÃO
RUA POETA BOCAGE. 13. B
1600-581 LISBOA
PORTUGAL
TEL. +210 109 102
FAX. +210 109 199
DATE
NOVEMBER 2002
