TURNS AT THE BAD BEAST CAFÉ

It goes between the porch of the little chapel and the two lady’s little chairs. Goes down the wall street, and arrives at the house.
The house is very simple. Therein shapes the most basic sensations of an archetypal Mediterranean house. A house with a courtyard open to a nearly southern view, with water and a tree. Is built on a bounce of the terrain on which the soft pending intensifies.
The architects like to refer to the language of architecture as if it exists. "The Language? Just what Novalis wanted from the word: 'reach several ideas with a single blow' "1 The houses that can be seen on the way up to here, have rooftops and shingles. This has a flat roof. Flat but not horizontal.
We arrived late afternoon in mid-season. All the wells of the house and the shutters are open glass wood and concealed within the walls. One passes freely from the outside to the outside through the house. The house is a huge porch, a covered. Each compartment space is suspended, extended, disturbed by the roof slope. The whole space of the house is lived in an automatic way: as if we have driven a car that did not know but similar to those driven before. In an automatic way and intense as if we recognize - decomposing? curious? love? - an unknown body.
Everything can be predictable. Except maybe the floating roof (a penthouse, a mansard?). "...; was here that I found Hegel, he repeated incessantly, it was here that I have actually dealt Schopenhauer for the first time, with the spirit clear and without being disturbed, the Elective Affinities and The Sentimental Journey, was here in the mansard Höller, who suddenly had access to the ideas that had been sealed during all the decades before the mansard and indeed, as he wrote, the most essential ideas, the most important and most necessary to my life; ... "2
Please note, This house is not the mansard Höller. It is the house of my youngest sister. Tica’s house.

João Luis Carrilho da Graça
Lisbon, 8th June 2010

1. TAVARES, Gonçalo M.; INVESTIGAÇÕES . NOVALIS; DIFEL Difusão Editorial S.A.; Oeiras, 2002, p. 64
2. João Luis Carrilho da Graça free translation; BERNHARD, Thomas; CORRECTIONS; Editions Gallimard; Paris, 1978; p. 11