Experimental

At the foot of Ourém Castle, a brick house rises — discreet, robust, silent — as if rooted into the hillside, as though it had always belonged there. The initial geometry is simple, almost primitive: a quadrangular volume, austere, with blind, flat façades. But inside, something unexpected unfolds.

An oversized gesture cuts through the space — a sweeping, almost absurd curve that breaks the rigidity of the grid and slices through the volume from end to end. The curve is not decorative; it is structural, spatial. It organises, distributes, and surprises. Too large to ignore, too precise to be accidental.

The floor is pale and rough — a mineral platform that echoes the earth and gravel of the surrounding paths. Upon it, this curve sets a route, a contained spiral, a kind of slow dance between walls that never quite touch. The house is not merely walked through — it is uncovered.

At the top, a single eye — a long, narrow window — pierces the thickness of the wall and observes. Not the street, not just the valley, but the distant, almost unreal city down below. It is an oblique gaze, melancholic, almost medieval. The house sees, but does not approach. It keeps its distance, like the castle above — both neighbour and sentinel.

This is an architecture of tension and restraint: between the weight of the brick and the lightness of the curve, between the closeness of stone and the distance of the gaze. At the foot of the castle, it does not compete with the past — it simply extends it, with a new, dense, and unexpected language.