Authors:
Saša Randić, Idis Turato
Team members:
Gordan Resan, Dubravka Perica
Client: Granturismo
Location:
Silves, Portugal
Project type:
preliminary design
Year designed:
2007.
The concept for the houses in Silves is based on the belief that tourism provides new opportunities for a redefinition of the contemporary territory, especially along the densely inhabited tourist areas.
When one states that tourism brings “discontinuities” in contemporary territory, it is, in effect, a good thing: it brings emotions back into business, no matter how primordial they are. Tourism is the only field where one can actually apply experimentation to the architectural product: models like mobile homes, which were promoted by the architectural debate and embraced only by the American working class, have re-emerged in the late tourist resort boom in the Mediterranean coast, only now inhabited by the middle class.
Research of the new housing model is based on an emotional rather than rational concept of inhabiting the territory characteristic for tourism, which correlates to the case-study housing conceptual models that epitomize a physical, almost therapeutic relationship with nature.