In Portugal’s Alentejo region, Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati has designed a massive, avant-garde concrete structure—a personal retreat that gestures to the heavens
THE VILLA ALÉM, an austere concrete house in Portugal’s Alentejo region that Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati designed and built for himself and his wife, Tamara, is the sort of structural provocation that leaves laypeople struggling to find an appropriate comparison. Olgiati’s own lawyer likens it to a drug baron’s fortress. When the house was under construction, a worker from a nearby village asked if it was a train station. “Then he looked inside,” Olgiati tells me, “and said, ‘Ah, the train has not arrived!’ ”