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The Maison Dom-Ino, formalised by Le Corbusier in 1914, liberated the plan from load-bearing walls. Slabs supported on columns; internal walls without structural function; the possibility of any partition. This conquest is structural, not programmatic. GAVINHO always works on a free slab — and chooses to divide, room by room. But the choice is its own, and the technical freedom that permits choosing is modernist inheritance. Without Dom-Ino, the contemporary house would be tributary to the load-bearing wall; with it, it is tributary to programmatic decision. The difference is decisive.

Before modernism, many traditions built houses in penumbra — small windows, thick walls, shadows as condition. Modernism reoriented the house towards light: large glazed surfaces, cross-ventilation, façades that breathe. GAVINHO would not return to making dark houses under the pretext of traditional intimacy. Natural light is project material, and its generous use is a conquest inherited without hesitation. What is added is calibration — different rooms ask for different regimes of light. But the starting point is abundance.

Cross-ventilation, the bathroom as its own room — direct consequence of generalised interior plumbing —, elimination of humidity, central heating. These sanitary conquests changed the average life expectancy at home. They reduced tuberculosis, rickets, respiratory illness. They are not optional. They are not stylistic. They are civilisational. GAVINHO always works within these conquests and does not question them — incorporating them as given, not as discussion.

Before modernism, structural glass, exposed steel, and raw concrete were utilitarian materials, unworthy of habitation. Modernism proved they had architectural dignity — not only technical, also aesthetic. Today, smooth concrete, zinc-coloured steel, and large-format glass are vocabulary available to domestic architecture. GAVINHO uses them regularly, in dialogue with stone, wood, and lime. But their availability is direct modernist inheritance: it was those architects who took them out of the factory and brought them into the living room.

Terraces, integrated balconies, gradual transitions between inside and out. Le Corbusier invented the roof-garden; Mies made the window into wall. These innovations reorganised the relation of the house to the exterior, and GAVINHO inherits them. Windows in our projects are not punctual openings — they are planes. Terraces are not addenda — they are programmatic extensions. This spatial grammar did not exist before modernism, and it would be impoverishment to abdicate from it.

Le Corbusier developed the Modulor (1948). Ernst Neufert published the Bauentwurfslehre (1936). For the first time in the history of the discipline, human dimensions — table heights, corridor widths, step heights, comfortable angles — began to be systematically studied. GAVINHO uses this data in every project. Each door, each level, each dimensional relation, is informed by decades of anthropometric research that modernism initiated. Without this work, contemporary technical precision would not exist.

The reduction of rhetorical ornamentation, the elimination of detail that only decorates, the return to the essential expression of structure — this is a modernist conquest GAVINHO keeps. What we reject is not formal economy; it is its programmatic extension. To eliminate redundant detail can be sophistication; to eliminate the room is amputation. But visual sobriety, the refusal of gratuitous ornament, the direct expression of matter — all of this enters the atelier's language via modernism, and is kept without reservation.

Embedded electrical installation, integrated climate control, thermal and acoustic insulation, digital infrastructure. All of this is modern technical envelope applied. GAVINHO develops its own systems — G.A.R.V.I.S., the Specifications Notebook — on the premise that technology must disappear from sight while serving those who inhabit. This premise is modernist: the house as invisible technical system. We inherit it, refine it, and take it to degrees of precision that the past century did not even anticipate.

Le Corbusier, Mies, Aalto, Niemeyer — all defended that the house is a project of authorship, not anonymous construction. That it has a name, a signature, a responsibility. This was a modernist conquest against the anonymous house of the speculative builder, against the faceless house-as-commodity. GAVINHO keeps this tradition: the house is a work, with author, with biography. Without modernism, this dignity would not be available to current domestic architecture — and the broader position of this atelier would have nothing to rest upon.