Running up that hill...

It's a very dangerous thing to start off in the profession that your father became famous in. Any Dutch person will wholeheartedly concur when they think of Jordi, the son of Johan Cruyff.

The son of the world-famous architect Alvaro Siza did just the same: he followed in his fathers' footsteps. But Alvaro Leite Siza Vieira managed to escape from the "nice, but not as good as his father"-image by designing a remarkable house. It's made up of a combination of large steps going up (or down) on a sloping site. Casa Tolo looks nothing like a traditional house: it has no front and back, no traditional roof, but is more like a deformed landscape. In a way it looks like a strangely deformed bunker of stairs and platforms, resting in the landscape.
The steps outside of the house (in fact, the rooftop terraces and stairs) follow the flow of the steep hillside (over 30 degrees), and the steps inside the house echo that same flow. Inside and outside always accompany eachother in this house. Also in materialization and window-openings: windows are used sparsely for framing mountain views. I think that the house is a beautiful gesture to experience the site to its fullest in a comfortable and confronting building.



I found this project via archidose.org. All the images are by Fernando Guerrera.