Architect Daniel Zamarbide worked with Leopold Banchini to design a pared-back Lisbon house with glass-walled rooms overlooking a full-height living space, as his own home.
Zamarbide and Banchini, who ran a studio together called Bureau A until 2017, collaborated on the design of the house that is tailored to suit his family's lifestyle. The name of the project, ‘Dodge House’ is a reference to American architect Irving Gill's Dodge House in California, which combined a modernist sensibility with elements borrowed from the architecture of the Spanish missions.
The property squeezes three bedrooms plus living spaces onto a footprint of less than 40 square metres in the Portuguese city's Mouraria neighbourhood. Low-cost construction techniques and simple materials are specifically chosen to build an affordable dwelling. Locally sourced tiles and stones are used for the furniture, walls and floors. The rough cement blocks used for the shell meet custom made simple metal work. The section in steps generates a generous full height living space in the small volume, in direct communication with all the floors. Towards the street, the pre-existing historical façade is left as found; a reminder of Lisbon’s fast changing city centre.
Evidently, the project responds as well to a complexity of functional requirements that has turned the house into a “machine à habiter”, playing again, quite deliberately and strongly with the history of modernism and its inhabitable typologies.
