Eduardo Souto Moura. As casas de Braga

Abstract

In these days we often see a systematic disregard of the accumulated knowledge, regarding to the suitability of architectural forms and construction materials for private or domestic life that is developed in these spaces. The culture of the image highlights the architectural inanimate object, photographed with perfection. Running away from that sense, my fields of study are the issues of home and living. The houses that are, after all, made by their inhabitants. Who are these people and how they make the appropriation of spaces is what we look for, to try to understand the development of concepts such as privacy, intimacy and domesticity. This is the fundamental question that I seek to exploit, believing that in the future I will be able to adapt it to my life and to a more sensitive and informed professional practice. From the beginning, I searched for an object of study that was a part of my own reality. Hence the naturally arise of my interest in the work of Eduardo Souto de Moura, not only from my personal admiration, but also because he is the author of two houses built in Braga, my city. The intention was not to make a theoretical study of his work, but to know the domestic dimension present in these two houses in particular. Why, merely, and only, these two houses? Because they are the only single family houses designed by the author in Braga, to the date, and also because they represent two distinct phases of the architect's creative journey. We seek to understand the development of the production process, reception and living on these two houses, namely, the crossing between the creative exercises of the architect with the wishes of the client and the moment where the physical works stop and the emotional construction, ownership and living starts for its residents. The work is structured in three parts. Initially, after a brief framework of contemporary architecture about the context in which the author is on, the knowledge of the issues on which he worked or is working, we seek to clarify how we should build and develop the client-architect relationship, the essential basis of any architecture project, so we can gather the inhabitant, the architect and the architecture in the same place. Then concepts are developed about the house as a space to inhabit. Specially exploring the word "living". In a third part, the two case studies are presented and discussed, with the aim of discovering in what extent the architectural image is the result of the representation of the house and living concept of the architect. Yet its important to observe the appropriation of space made by the inhabitants of the houses and compare the development of this process in the two works.