House in Luanda: Patio and Pavilion, Luanda, Angola - Home sweet city...

Winner selected for inexpensive housing competition in Luanda, Angola

Architect Pedro Sousa has been awarded first prize in an international competition entitled ‘A House in Luanda: Patio and Pavilion’. Launched by Lisbon Architecture Triennale and promoted in collaboration with the Luanda Triennale, the brief challenged architects and designers to compose an inexpensive family unit with external patio suitable for a family of 7-9 individuals.

Aimed at severely deprived families in Luanda, the scheme aims to incorporate ‘evolutionary solutions, and possibly self-construction, which are therefore adapted to the speed of transformation of the social fabric of Angola and Luanda’. A jury composed of Álvaro Siza Vieira (president of the jury), João Luís Carrilho da Graça, Fernando Mello Franco, Barry Bergdoll and Ângela Mingas selected Sousa’s concept design from a total of 599 proposals, noting that it ‘distinguished itself from others by the way it questions and rethinks THE HOUSE AS A CITY, THE CITY AS A HOME’.

Sousa’s design approach takes the image of a city as a transferable entity, considering architecture and ‘the city’ as ‘different manifestations of the same theme’. To the architect, the home must not only act as a supporting factor of the larger urban environment (defining streets, squares and so forth) but also capture the metropolitan feel of a city with 4.5m residents whilst retaining an individual identity.

Souza expands: “Our goal would be to create an architecture that contains diversity and simplicity; architecture that when lived-in, has the capability of generating the curiosity that leads to the discovery of a series of intimate and unexpected places.”