Broken House is a single-family house from the mid-30s converted by Fala Atelier into a lightly stripped housing block. Located in Porto, Portugal, the project, completed in 2019, measures 340m² (3,660ft²).
An odd, asymmetrical art-deco house, nested in the urban fabric searched for clarity after an erratic succession of renovations and extensions.
The rooms are open to typological diversity, despite the rigid plan repeated in every level. All living spaces revolve around ambiguous rooms, broken in their middle and punctuated by central blue columns, suggesting a fragmented reading of their otherwise unitary material appearance. The blue elements function as the only vertical ornament of the domestic spaces where the floors are built with three kinds of wood, forming stripes of varying widths, acting as an endless tapestry.
The spiral staircase ties the house together: glossy dark blue doors, a pre-existing romanticised handrail and a chessboard of different tones of marble make it a cheerful parade.
The art deco house is completed with horizontal light yellow stripes facing the street and vertical black and white stripes facing the garden. This language of bands is carried along to both façades as a binding counterforce to the heterogeneity of the project. The house finds a happy coherence in the small incoherences of its architecture. Somehow, a new kind of peace is found, fragile and festive.
— Fala Atelier
Drawings:
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Photographs by Ricardo Loureiro
Visit site Fala Atelier
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