Holiday Home on Pico
Pico, named after the volcano Ponta do Pico – Portugal’s highest landform – is the second largest of the Azores islands. On its northern coast, east of the port city São Roque do Pico, the architects converted a run-down farmhouse dating to the nineteenth century into a holiday home. It was important to them and the client to alter the ruins as little as possible and to preserve this piece of land – which is in use agriculturally to this day – and the existing paths in their original form. The architects inserted – structurally and visually independent of the vestiges of the old farmhouse – a new exposed-concrete building within the basalt dry masonry walls.
