The Windmill House designed by Portuguese practice Box Arquitectos is a narrow, white home in the dense urban center of Ponta Delgado, with two volumes that face each other across a long garden.
Windmill House Technical Information
- Architects1-2: BOX Architects
- Lead Architects: Barabara Morgado + Oscar Catarino
- Location: Ponta Delgada – Azores – Portugal
- Topics: White Architecture, Portuguese Houses
- Area: 110 m2
- Constructor: Vicor caetano engenharia & construção
- Project Year: 2021
- Photographs: © Ivo Tavares Studio
The main facade is exclusively the boundary between interior and exterior, with no
reason for a relation between both, besides being in its way.– BOX Architects
Windmill House Photographs
Text by the Architects
In a consolidated urban mesh, at the center of Ponta Delgada, the approach answers to a program
of a tiny single-family house with two flights, where the lower floor accommodates a
single social area, while the two small bedrooms are located on the upper floor. With only 4.20
meters at the front, with no space for urban pediatrician circulation space, the facade results in the
child’s imaginary of a house drawing… one door and one window.
In that sense, the main facade is exclusively the boundary between interior and exterior, with no
reason for a relation between both, besides being in its way.
The program develops without the need to transition or divide spaces. The only social area
of the house gains dimension in its depth when it finds the garden at the end of the space. The
garden establishes the balance between the house and the private addition at the end of the lot. On the
upper floor, the East Bedroom gets a terrace, from which you can visualize the houses that make
the urban form so characteristic of the neighborhood.
The necessity to simulate a greater spatial amplitude is made possible by the skylights in the
pitched roof, which receives the light and spreads it throughout the interior spaces, working as a “
diaphragm”, increasing the “vertical perspective.”
Windmill House Plans
Windmill House Image Gallery
- Engineering: SOPSEC Açores
- Interiors Team: BOX arquitectos
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