Costa da Caparica is a piece of land that every Lisboners and tourists passing the 25th April bridge knows very well, and in a way, it could be considered the beach of the city of Lisbon, although it doesn’t belong to the same administration. The beginning of this piece of land is quite clear it starts with the São João beach, what is less clear is its endpoint; if we are to walk the Costa we would arrive the Cabo Espichel without feeling a true discontinuity of the territory, made by rock, sand, water, wind and light.
As we can’t really tell where exactly it ends, the urban model of concrete towers could potentially be applied to all Costa until Cabo Espichel, and if that was the case, we could end up with the loss of the natural feeling of this land. This long beach is inhabited by several fishermen huts, some of them rentable some just abandoned landmarks, but there are other inhabitants of this land which are more nomadic, people coming from Lisbon spend their nights in a tent just behind the beach, in a way, we could consider this territory very much inhabited by nomadic tents and huts.
This house is an attempt to combine the fishermen hut with the camping tent and try to get the best of both worlds, the lightness and versatility of the tend with the stability of a hut. The shape of the Beach House is a “replica” of the volume of the existing fishermen huts but materically adapted to get the lightness feeling of a tent. The house will be for short living periods, people coming from Lisbon or tourists, in general, could spend their beach day having the luxury of a stable platform on the beach protected from the sun rays and wind, and when it comes to the night time the house could be easily spent enjoyed with the heat of a fire burning at the back under the stars, hearing the ocean breathing.
As this house is meant for short living periods, there would be no electricity needs as it would help be lived more as light tend, with the benefit of a fixed toilet, the only internal volume of the house. The construction is quite simple, two concrete columns in the sand, a metal frame holding the timber floor and the tend.