06 / 16ResidentialVila Nova de Gaia, Portugal
Six co-operative houses stepping down a slope to the Douro, each roof the next house's terrace. · Built
Section 1 of 4
Section 2 of 4
Section 3 of 4
Section 4 of 4
Facts
The Cooperativa Habitacional do Candal is six households who bought a steep plot above the Douro together and then went looking for an architect. They wanted six houses, each with its own door and its own outdoor room, for less than any of them could have built alone. The plot is 2 650 m²; the houses and their shared spaces come to 3 180 m².
The ground falls west towards the river. We set the six houses one behind another down the slope, each 1.8 m lower than the one behind it, so that every roof is the terrace of the house above. Nobody looks into a neighbour's living room and everybody looks at the river. Section A–A (S-301) was the first drawing the co-operative agreed, months before any plan. Every house has the same width and the same section; the households differ only in how they divided their rooms.
The living rooms open fully onto the terraces through pine-framed doors that fold back against the party walls. From May to October the houses are used as much outside as in.
The structure is a row of concrete party walls, 300 mm thick and cork-lined inside, with slabs spanning between them. Vasco Ferraz Engenharia kept each wall continuous from the top of the site to the bottom, so the walls retain the slope as well as dividing the houses. The cork is both the insulation and the inside finish. It is warm to the hand and soft to sound, and the households chose it over plaster at the first cost meeting.
Granite copes the walls where they meet the sky, and granite forms the treads of the shared stair that runs down the north edge of the plot. The treads sit on a concrete stringer, with a landing at every front door. The stair is the street of the co-operative, where post, shopping and children arrive.
Six households agreed on one section before they agreed on anything else. After that, the kitchens were easy.
The houses were finished in 2020. Field Office Landscape planted the terraces with the households, and each roof now carries a different garden: vegetables on one, a lemon tree in a granite trough on another, gravel and a long table on a third. Seen from the river path below, the slope reads as six terraces and one stair, and the west elevation (E-401) is drawn to be read the same way.
Because every roof is someone's garden, the roofs were detailed as gardens from the start: deep soil, a fall to a single outlet, and a granite edge wide enough to sit on.
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Ground floor plan of Vila Nova Terraces at 1:200. Walls in solid black (400 mm concrete), openings as breaks with glazing lines, structural grid lettered and numbered; spaces: house 1, house 2, house 3, house 4, house 5, house 6.
Drawing set · 4 sheets
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