Site Specific: To Cook

STUDIOLO - Serra de São Mamede, Portugal, 2020

Architect Rui Filipe Pinto’s first project in the guise of STUDIOLO is entitled ‘To Cook’, an adaptive reuse project that inserts a restaurant into a series of buildings in the Portuguese village of Serra de São Mamede.

A series of disassociated rooms are newly stitched together to create a form of promenade architectural. A route leads up from a narrow alley, through a sequence of entrance spaces, to a dining room overlooking the street below. Just before the dining space is reached the route passes through a lobby lined with painted plywood screens that create a moment of compression and anticipation; a lightweight intervention creating a heavyweight experience leading to the heart of the restaurant.

STUDIOLO To Cook is an extension project for a small restaurant in the heart of Serra de São Mamede. The existing programme grows to the first floor, where previously there was a dwelling, and to a neighbouring body where a garage was located. In a residual space, a small body comes to implant itself, serving as an agultinating element, becoming the new face of the project, where the main entrance is located.

Like a hermit crab, the new intervention has a strong and resistant head, built in concrete and cement bricks, which allows itself to rest outside. The more fragile and delicate body finds shelter in the pre-existence, and is materialised in a wood wainscot, with a water painting that allows the traces of its nature to be revealed. The main room takes up the ground plan motif of the existing dwelling, and the squares are the divisions defined by the hydraulic cement tiles.

The spatial articulation allows the control of the building users’ perception in action: the entrance is made after turning back the landscape, a raw space, with a red Pompey pavement allows to manage the flow of entrances and exits; one can perceive the room, through the service area but the eye is alerted to the route to follow through a ‘wooden mouth’ that comes to lead the users; following, one enters a low, sombre, totally homogenous space, that steals the vision from the gaze, and pushes the body against the floor, only the vision of the external light in the background allows to perceive the continuity of the sequence, or where to follow; as we continue, the passage is brutally exacerbated by an exaggerated ceiling height, and the user is received in the dining area where 3 screens open to the landscape; the eyes slowly get used to it, and more and more things can be perceived; from the room, relations with the interior and the exterior are established, a window looks at the cooking area, a door at the bar, we are in the middle of all the action, like a spectator who has found a place in the middle of the stage; the last step is to sit and look at the landscape that, due to its green nature, ends up blending between the green of the interior walls.

The control of the action opens doors for an exacerbated experience – with few resources the project tries to invite the body to physical experiences before the tasting ones begin.

NOTES

Many thanks to Rui Filipe Pinto at STUDIOLO for his help with compiling this post.

For more work by STUDIOLO visit their website here or their Instagram here.

Photography by Frederico Farinatti.

Published 10th May 2024.