Cura's House / Atelier AAVV

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The rehabilitation of a building is, at its essence, a matter of identity. If the ruined remnants of the past are a faint, sometimes cherished memory of what we once were, the opportunity for reconstruction is a window to an uncertain, sometimes desired future that we have yet to become. Standing before the profound question of what an abandoned building wants to be, pre-conceived ideas on how to proceed, whether driven by nostalgia or by a contemporary impulse, aren't enough. What seems certain is that it poses, in its entirety, the challenge of the architectural project. It's about not letting go of the old or the new, listening to the stones that remain and the wind that carries them, putting everything on the table at once, and seeking, amidst the noise and silence, the design of a construction that has its own order and, within that order, uncovers a form we didn't yet know.Along this journey, we aimed to create a house that could continue to be many houses, where the street level floor and the attic were what their names evoke in our memory, and that was, rather than a functionally organized space, a constellation of spaces that, being opened by the freedom found in the span of the structure, would keep room for the stories that time might bring.Text description provided by the architects.As with other important things in life, it is difficult to set fixed rules for the rehabilitation of a building. And just like with those other important things, we prefer to take the risk of the journey, the mysterious but committed process, impossible yet inevitable, of pursuing the right way. At Casa do Cura, the historical and imagined memories of a corner between the Lapa and Madragoa neighbourhoods blended with the spatial possibilities of a new wooden structure, a conscious trace of the old building's nature, and with the building's narrow space in the city, to uncover a free constellation of spaces, open to new stories.Thus, beyond the painted wood and the light walls that connect to the solid ones in continuous plaster, we brought in clay, which inLisbonis always found on rooftops, bringing it also to its place on the floor, a familiar stone for strength, and a foreign one for distinction, and we used remnants to mark the entrance, with the door number made from earth gathered at the construction site, and an old stone serving as the first step.At Casa do Cura, it was the ruin of a traditional construction system and the tight space of the building in the city that showed us how to build. A new structure, where the same pine wood, spanning across the full depth of the building, defines the possibility of a light construction core that, between the inherited solid walls, can freely shape the space.