Avelino Duarte House

Alvaro Siza Vieira – Avelino Duarte House, Ovar, Portugal, 1981-1985

Duarte House, designed for the Duarte family in the early 1980s in Ovar (a small town in central-northern Portugal), represents a successful example of a single-family villa designed by Álvaro Siza.

The building is located inside a rectangular lot with access to the road along the north-east side. It is confined by adjacent properties through a white plastered enclosure, and unlike adjacent houses, it does not have a swimming pool behind it but a covered parking space and a small storage room. The actual construction is immersed in the green of the garden, composed of a rigorous design of the greenery and of the flowerbeds. The morphology of the dwelling is that of an asymmetric H, from above, it appears to be composed of three volumes and rises on three floors, joined at the north-east / south-west extremes by an excavation that cuts vertically the building generating the the building's main entrance, this solution is taken up through the analysis of Portuguese vernacular architecture. On the rear façade this subtraction element is iterated at full height.