Written by
Inês Moura
Founding Partner
Students are taught to draw walls and then add windows. We try to work the other way around: decide where the light should fall at nine in the morning in February, and let the wall follow.
Designing the shadow
In a hot climate the shadow is the room. At the Monte Library the coffered south wall exists to cast a particular shade at a particular hour; its depth, a metre and a half, was calculated before we knew what the rooms behind it would be.
In the north, the opposite applies. A clerestory set high in a bedroom in the Douro catches the last of the winter sun and drags it across the ceiling for twenty minutes. Nobody will ever notice the detail. Everyone notices the twenty minutes.
Fewer, deeper openings
Our buildings tend to have fewer windows than people expect, and deeper ones. A deep reveal softens the edge of the light, gives the eye somewhere to rest and turns the wall itself into a source of reflected light. It is the cheapest luxury in architecture.
Next note →