Portugal. An austere swimming pool featuring pink marble

In Delgada, a hamlet located 75 kilometers from Lisbon, Camarim arquitectos has been commissioned a swimming poolas an addition to a single-family residence. The wide area that includes the building and the newly-built swimming pool covers a surface of almost 8,000 sqm. The structure conceived by Camarim arquitectos is parallel to the existing building and consists of a slab of concrete hosting a pool and a pergola.

The architects commented “we intuitively rejected any idea of dialogue with this house, but it would have not been convenient for the pergola to be too far from it;” the addition has been therefore conceived as independent from both a compositional and aesthetic perspective. The austere – almost archaic – structure has been built in raw concrete while the pink marble cladding of the pool gives the composition a polished twist. The slab, the pool and the pergola arrange a firm and assertive composition that imposes to the topography of the site between the trees surrounding it.