15 / 16ResidentialSagres, Portugal
Two concrete boxes on a schist cliff, one sunk into the rock and one cantilevering towards the Atlantic. · Built
Section 1 of 4
Section 2 of 4
Section 3 of 4
Section 4 of 4
Facts
The site is a plot of 5 800 m² on the schist cliffs near Sagres, facing the Atlantic to the west. Our private client wanted a house for a family and their guests that could be lived in through the winter as well as the summer, with the sea present in every room but overwhelming none of them. The house is 420 m². It was designed in 2019 and finished in 2022.
We divided the house into two concrete boxes. The lower box is sunk into the rock and holds the bedrooms, bathrooms and a study: cool, quiet rooms with thick walls. The upper box sits across it and cantilevers 7 m beyond the cliff edge, holding the kitchen and the living room. The axonometric (X-501) shows the two boxes crossing. Between them, a terrace sits on the roof of the lower box, sheltered from the north wind by the upper one.
Vasco Ferraz Engenharia designed the upper box as a pair of storey-high concrete walls working as beams, tied back into the lower box and anchored into the rock behind it. Section A–A (S-301) shows the anchors and the overhang.
The excavation for the lower box produced a great deal of schist, and we kept all of it. It is laid dry as the outer face of the lower walls and the edges of the terraces, so the part of the house that sits in the cliff is faced with the cliff. Ingrid Solberg and Field Office Landscape replanted the disturbed ground with the scrub that grew there before, raised from seed collected on the site.
The light off the Atlantic is strong enough that a large window becomes a wall of glare for half the day. The house has one large opening, in the living room, facing west over the sea, and eleven small ones. Each small window frames one thing: a rock, a lighthouse, a neighbour's chimney. Cork lines the bedrooms and the living-room ceiling, which keeps the rooms warm in winter and quiet when the wind is up.
In this light the small window is the generous one. We would rather draw twelve good windows than a wall of glass.
The family uses the upper box through the day and goes down into the rock at night. In winter storms the living room is the place to watch the weather from, and the bedrooms below hardly hear it. The client asked for the sea in every room. In the end the bedrooms have it only through small windows, and nobody has asked for more.
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Ground floor plan of Sagres Cliff House at 1:100. Walls in solid black (400 mm concrete), openings as breaks with glazing lines, structural grid lettered and numbered; spaces: bedrooms.
Drawing set · 5 sheets
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