In Parada do Monte, in the interior of Minho in northern Portugal, Nuno Brandão Costa buries most of A House in Ruins below ground so the stone shell that once held a family of eleven keeps the skyline.
A very small stone building on a large plot of rough terrain in Parada do Monte, above Melgaço in the interior of Minho, once housed eleven people. Eleven, in a footprint you could pace out in seconds. That number is less a curiosity than a record of how this part of northern Portugal lived, and it sits under every decision Nuno Brandão Costa made here between 2010 and 2016.
By the time the work began the building was a ruin. The obvious move, roofing it and pushing a new volume up the slope, would have handed the site to the newcomer. Instead the extension goes down. A lounge and three bedrooms occupy an underground body cut into the hill, and what still holds the ridge is the old masonry, its top left as an uneven line of blocks with two slabs standing upright like the last teeth in a jaw.
The powerful landscape and the character of the existing ruin, the studio writes, suggested an extension with no defined boundaries, but limited by the local materials. The limit is stone. The most telling piece of it runs west, granite extending the original facade across the slope. Those blocks came from another building nearby, since demolished, and were reset into a ruin that was itself being given a second life. The wall is second-hand twice over.
Light reaches the buried rooms two ways. To the east, a courtyard is cut out of the land. To the west, the glazing runs as a low continuous slot beneath the old stonework, capped by a single earth-toned beam that carries the length of the facade and ties the two levels of the original structure to the extension. From the grass the effect is of a collapsed wall resting on a line of glass, with a bed visible behind it.
Inside, the palette narrows to white plaster, pale aggregate floors, a stair with granite-flecked treads and a handrail no thicker than a finger, an old timber table heavy enough to look structural. Dining and cooking stay in the two-level original volume. Three bodies of water flank the main structure, the western one held in view from the house, and to the east a concrete canopy takes the cars and the firewood beside a small kitchen garden.
Portugal has no shortage of rural stone shells turned into second homes, and most end the same way, with the ruin swallowed by the thing it was meant to shelter. Here the arithmetic inverts. The new house is the larger of the two and you can barely find it, while the outline eleven people knew still reads against the sky. Among the projects gathered in Set in Stone, few argue so plainly that leaving a wall standing can be the entire design.
