In this way the house is creating a new spot, another wich it was before. The hole living floor is considered as one space without limitations between in and out.

Bricks were used as the main material for the hole building. The walls are entirely built in bricks like the tradition in this region. This is one more connection we tried to create to the beautyful historical village.

The windows are carefuly placed in each façade without cutting up the massiv cube. Only a large continual surface of brickwall can always appear in a new light and develop his beauty.

From the outside the apertures seams small and occasionaly, but they follow in a srtict way the inner conception of the rooms and sometimes they are even very large (from the floor to the ceiling) to let the light get in.

Behind the steel entrancedoor there is a narrow and high hall with only one small window. From there starts a long straight stairs along the natural slope direct up to the last floor. To reach the sleeping rooms there is a passage in the middle of the stairs. From the bottom of the stairs you can look all up to the roof, it’s a narrow and high space like the streets in the traditional village. The house becomes a village.

Text provided by the architect.

Having identified the site, a pragmatic analyse of the circumstances was in order: the demands of the program were a house for a couple and child, a visitor’s suit preferably dislocated from the house as also should be the storehouse for the water-ski activities holding a shower, bathroom and storage area.

The area of the house, inevitably small, was specified by the reduced dimension of the pre-existent ruin. Thus, the first sketches of the solution appear in its dependence… Meanwhile, the fundamental decision revealed itself through the house orientation. Its final location on site, at right angles to the slop seeks for a better relation with the plot and the platform where it “lays”, avoiding all trees and damage to the outside area. The weightless intervention enhanced by the overhanging part that shoots off the riverbank cliff maximizes the transparent appearance from the river reducing land occupancy.

The house makes a dialectic reference to Malaparte House by Adalberto Libera and the remarkable table Less by Jean Nouvel, suggesting the constructive solution for the top of the hanging part.

As a half-buried house in its relation to the main access it appears diminished; on the other hand, from the river it appears as a glass frame dissimulated on the vegetation. The relation established by the house and ruin defines both the access and the scale of the intervention, transforming the ruin into a constant presence from the inside of the house such as any other landscape element.

The concrete plasticity in relation with the luxuriant flora was determinant, therefore the careful concrete cast drawing. This concrete volume with accessible roof was entirely covered with birch on the inside and has grey self-levelled pavement.

Text provided by the architect.

Precision, lightness and formal simplicity are the aims to pursue. The result must be simple in form and in detail. But simplicity is only achieved through a gradual and continuous process of successive modifications that often bring up solutions that are quite different from the original ideas. Everybody was open to question previous options and, during the process, time often judged if the chosen solutions were appropriate, from the structural and architectural points of view, together. In this project “forced” solutions always ended up being changed in the course of time.

Architects and Engineers worked together to achieve a common goal, which was not viewed as the exclusive territory of one or the other.

The original idea to “fit” the Stadium into the quarry, with only two stands, started a process in which the solutions encountered were the natural sequence of confirming and consolidating ideas, the viability of which was not given at the start. The initial choice of the road to follow was based more on sensibility and instinct than on known results. The essential process of research and confirmation followed, in which the criteria for accepting solutions was based on rigorous cost/benefit analyses (functional, technical, economical and aesthetical).

In this process we were aware of the risk that arises from constantly pushing back the limits, and controlled it through an intensive research methodology. Risk assessments, redundancies, independent teams studying the same problem, cross-checking results, allowed us to gradually drop the inevitable initial “extra safety margins”.

This process, which took advantage of all the available resources, had to be convergent. Its fruit was after all the construction of a building – there were deadlines and budgets to stick to. Pragmatism and flexibility were needed and we had to incorporate the limits that we could not exceed.

The variety and complexity of the technical problems that this project arose constituted a great challenge for our team but, simultaneously, an opportunity to learn that we did not waste.

A word for the role of the Client – the success of the Project was only possible with total commitment and trust from the Client – we had it throughout the whole process in the person of the Mayor of Braga. Contract strategies have been developed and put in place to allow for flexibility and fit a process that was far away from being closed. Time schedule and costs lived together with the technical demands and aesthetical aspirations of the Project.

It is rewarding to realise now that to talk about the stadium’s structure is also to talk about its architecture, and that to explain its architecture is to tell the story of the engineering problems it brought up and how they were overcome.

Text provided by the architect.