The project was developed in cooperation with Leopold Banchini Architects.
Two hundred years ago, at the turn of the 19th century, an architect drove from cold Chicago to California to open his office in San Diego in search of a healthier climate. He was an employee in the most influential office of the time (Sullivan's) and had actually worked under the direction of Frank Lloyd Wrights for the transport building, which has since become a historic icon. At that time, Irving Gill began an astonishing creative career as an inventor and discreet avant-gardist. The story is interesting when you compare it to the reach of the media between these two moments of history. Today's immediacy of the action pictures with Portuguese newly renovated interiors can hardly be compared with Gill's time. His architecture had to wait until Esther McCoy wrote the now-well-known publication Five California Architects in 1960 to be recognized and celebrated. In fact, a few years later, it was Reyner Banham who presented this work to the international public in his book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies" (1971). Despite this late success, the destruction of one of his major works, The Dodge House, could not be prevented, not even by a strong campaign carried out by Esther McCoy to save this historic icon of Californian architecture.
The Dodged House in Lisbon pays him a double honor. On the one hand, the architecture of Irving Gill, with its very special modernity, which he established as the basis of his practice, which seems to perfectly reflect the Portuguese context (just as Gill's architecture knew how to evolve from the missions in California). On the other hand, as a trace of the time in which the Dodged House was designed and built, he has preferred to keep his eyes closed and the façade opaque, and has bet on a less marketable feature, space, emptiness and interior volume, which denies the efficiency of land use. Within a rather small plot (about 40 m2 ground floor, 94 m2 in total), the Dodged House has privileged a strong section and a contemplative emptiness, proposing a variety of indoor and outdoor spaces that extend into a courtyard.
Obviously, the project also responds to a complexity of functional requirements that has made the house a "machine à habiter" (living machine) that deliberately and strongly plays with the history of modernism and its habitable typologies. Ultimately, the Dodged House is a fairly simple and readable project. Although it may be complex in its embedding in the urban fabric and historical context, it is quite straightforward in its own way to occupy space and distribute the program on a small plot. As the name suggests, the "Dodged House" attempts to escape the actual state of a particular architecture in Lisbon.
[Source: Bureau Daniel Zamarbide ] (https://bureau.ac/projects/dodged-house/)
Images: Dylan Perrenoud
