Fernando Guerra, FG+SG, photographer. House in Torres Vedras, Portugal, by Pedro Gadanho
Another package of beautiful photographs from Fernando Guerra in Portugal: Casa em Torres Vedras by Pedro Gadanho. This is a nineteenth century house with a massive renovation that owes a lot to utopian visions of the 1970s: plastic, colour, capsules, re-inhabitation where modernism bumps up against plaster mouldings, pre-fabrication, James Bond and Star Trek done by Zefferelli. There is a kind of sentimentality here, not for a pre-modern costume drama past, but for a pre-cynical view of the future.
Clearly Lisbon of the 2010s is the Barcelona of the 1980s. Its architects seem particularly free to break from any kind of deference to any kind of thing. Although Guerra's photographs strip out all signs of inhabitation showing just the abstract space and surfaces – this in itself a high modern tradition – this folio led me to Gadanho's blog, shrapnel contemporary: completely exuberant, messy, articulate, provoking, graphic, self-serving, terrifically interesting.
Gadanho's discussion of the Casa de Carreço (below) is a brilliant little text about making architecture: a miniature manifesto, and all the more powerful for its throw away form.
Fernando Guerra, FS+SG Photography. Casa de Carreço, Portugal.