Souto de Moura, House in Alcanena

Originally published in Domus 754/September 1993

Recent architecture in Portugal has permitted influences to come as much from external masters as from internal ones. The widely discussed School of Porto is a lineage of practitioners that has closely studied each other's projects as well as referred to bodies of work that would support a particular stance for and against local and contemporary tendencies. In this sense, the buildings of the 1950s and 1960s by one of Eduardo Souto de Moura's teachers, Fernando Távora, reveal a synthesis of local vernacular traditions with processes of abstraction (as developed in the art and architecture of the first decades of the twentieth century), countering the false consciousness of Salazarist "traditionalism". Souto de Moura's Braga Market (1980) was in part a homage to Távora's famed Tennis Pavilion (1957) at the Quinta de Conceição in Matosinhos. Alvaro Siza, another teacher of Souto de Moura, has opened architecture's plastic and figurative dimensions to his student. While Siza looked in particular to Alvar Aalto for social and architectural inspiration, Souto de Moura's sensibilities and intellect are closer to the emphatic tectonics of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the work of the Dutch De Stijl architects. The personal freedom, as might be argued to exist in Siza's work, is considered by some younger Portuguese architects to be a unique privilege, to which they either cannot or do not wish to add. Perhaps a similar situation existed in Finland since World War II, but certainly since the death of Aalto.

Souto de Moura's Cultural Centre in Porto and his early houses could confidently and appropriately draw on the architectural theme of Mie van der Rohe's courtyard house, as their densely built settlement structure were rightly seen a providing the ideal framework within which introverted buildings might be placed. Furthermore, Souto de Moura's design for the low-rise cultural centre and the single storey houses permit the use of the aforementioned emphatic tectonics, even to the extent of seeing the union of walls and roofs idealized as table-like structures. In the tradition of Mies van der Rohe, Souto de Moura conceives of architecture as a precise frame for life, neither its reflection nor its induction. These above considerations are recalled as a general architectural context within which one might read the recent work of Souro de Moura. Numerous houses and now public buildings by the Porto architect are under construction or are being completed, and it is noteworthy to follow the work's development from the simple single-storey domestic structures to the multi-storey public buildings. The table metaphor is thus increasingly coming under scrutiny for its appropriateness, and Souto de Moura has been able to adapt his penchant for essentialist reduction at the nearly completed Faculty of Geology building for Aveiro University.

With regard to the single family house at Alcanena, in southern Portugal, a project that was conceived in 1987, Souto de Moura was reinvestigating the notion of extension in Mies van der Rohe's Brick House of 1923 and combining this with the hierarchical disposition of courtyards. The house sits on a raised mound overlooking lightly undulating terrain of vineyards and fig tree orchards. As one of the few buildings in the area, it commands a panoramic view over the agricultural countryside, and Souto de Moura took this to be the generating thrust for the single storey house's organisation. Approaching the house across an orchard from the nearby road, a square cour d'honneur with an inscribing circular granite pavement forms the nucleus of the house. Opposite to the gate is the house's main entrance: a glazed corridor that acts as a fulcrum between the western public and eastern private rooms. Each wing is in some way organized around subsidiary courtyards, be it facing the garden or internalised. While Mies van der Rohe's courtyard houses of the 1930's were in some instances object within a walled garden, Souto de Mourass House at Alcanena enter a dialogue with Mies van der Rohe's Hubbe House project of 1935 with its partly enclosed yard that define an interior while also giving on to the larger surroundings. The House at Alcanena deals with differently dimensioned external spaces. Architectural history has seen numerous versions of such compositions, whether it be the case of Aldo van Eyck's iterative Orphanage in Amsterdam, or Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, or even John Lautner's spectacular House at Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The House at Alcanena does not stress the differences of the external space to the extent that the abovementioned buildings do, it is a quality that might be enhanced in the house if some of the external elements of the earlier design were to be realised, such as the east-facing pergola in combination with the swimming pool, as well as a more geometrically sympathetic landscape treatment.

In comparison to Souto de Moura's earlier House on the Avenida Boavista in Porto, where fragments were included to construct a narrative of the site's mythical history, few elements at the Alcanena House give an indication of the same interest, notably the sandstone clad front wall with its pilasters, recalling a gate that once stood on the site, or the large granite basin in the eastern courtyard, reminiscent of those that used to be found in Portuguese farmsteads. The exact treatment of these elements removes the house as a whole from the historically evocative power; in their pristine setting they have become quite abstracted. The house's coolness has partly to do with these processes of abstraction, partly to do with the client's meticulous choice of furniture: the discreet charm of Ruhlmann-like furniture, the sparseness in the number of pieces in relation to the space, the constant fully glazed perimeter affording panoramic views of the agricultural surrounding, all conspire to render this house and it contents a still-life set on a warm, dark, chestnut-coloured floor, only occasionally disturbed by the fleeting figures of it inhabitants.

Souto de Moura's extensive use of proprietary aluminium sliding doors, the corrugated steel garage door and the stainless steel and beech veneered kitchen sit awkwardly with the carefully crafted steel internal screen to the kitchen, the rich texture of the granite cobbled entrance courtyard, the aforementioned supple wooden floor and the potentially rich complex of various wall layers. The ambivalence between technical precision and variegated craftsman hip is not a problem peculiar to Souto de Moura's work, it is a subject much debated in Portugal if not elsewhere too. While a creative paradox of these two seemingly irreconcilable forces should not be excluded, a paradox that indeed could be inherently poetic as can be seen in the relation between the house's variegated configuration in relation to its conceptual clarity, the question posed by this subject requires a precise answer. The question enters the heart of our very own conception of what we consider to be of our time and of our society: can we creditably bring together the promise of a mode of living that, in opposition to the status quo, is seen to be progressive, if not in love with the future with a characteristic diversity of textures that we know to be only produceable by age-old ways? Souto de Moura's work, the greater it production and the larger the buildings, will surely not evade this Mephistophelian subject.