João Álvaro Rocha
Location: Matosinhos, Oporto. Portugal
Date: 2003
Housing Complex on Calle Seara. Porto, Portugal
€4.00
Tax included
João Álvaro Rocha
Location: Matosinhos, Oporto. Portugal
Date: 2003
The plot where the building is located, albeit within the city perimeter, keeps a part of the characteristics of the urban periphery. As result of the several transformations that tend to remove its suburban character, we can testify the crossing between a rural world in regression and the fragile appearance of an urban fabric with evident difficulties of articulation.
We are in a transition area, where the tension between green and built spaces, between topography and building mass, between public and private spaces takes a major role and importance. The settlement of the new buildings is based on this analysis of the environment and of the specific characteristics of the plot, namely the visual impact of this intervention in a context marked by a profound unevenness between the several types of occupation which in its own way create a fragile urban dimension. The fact of being in an articulation between the existing buildings, the adjacent green areas and the new road scheme burdens the buildings with the difficult task of searching the complex balance in which they try to redraw the structure of the place.
We are in a transition area, where the tension between green and built spaces, between topography and building mass, between public and private spaces takes a major role and importance. The settlement of the new buildings is based on this analysis of the environment and of the specific characteristics of the plot, namely the visual impact of this intervention in a context marked by a profound unevenness between the several types of occupation which in its own way create a fragile urban dimension. The fact of being in an articulation between the existing buildings, the adjacent green areas and the new road scheme burdens the buildings with the difficult task of searching the complex balance in which they try to redraw the structure of the place.
That’s the reason why the project tries to create a new composition of the surrounding urban fabric, particularly of the neighbourhood of workers´ dwellings located in the North side of the access street. Based on a very fragmented propriety structure, this neighbourhood is characterized by plots that are built in great depth from the street front and which give it certain permeability in a number of fractions.
The survival of this neighbourhood is now threatened by the new and bigger buildings which start to appear in the West side of the same street, and yet, even with the mutilations it has been subjected to, it still shows signals of some intense communitarian life that the project tries to re-interpretate. The size of the buildings is based on a compromise between the size of this neighbourhood and the established program, in the search of the appropriate scale to draw the tension between different times of construction. The chosen location of the buildings tries to favour permeability in both axis, balancing the materialization of the street front with the orientation of the plot’s natural slope – it descends in the South-West direction with good solar orientation and the sea in the horizon…
The survival of this neighbourhood is now threatened by the new and bigger buildings which start to appear in the West side of the same street, and yet, even with the mutilations it has been subjected to, it still shows signals of some intense communitarian life that the project tries to re-interpretate. The size of the buildings is based on a compromise between the size of this neighbourhood and the established program, in the search of the appropriate scale to draw the tension between different times of construction. The chosen location of the buildings tries to favour permeability in both axis, balancing the materialization of the street front with the orientation of the plot’s natural slope – it descends in the South-West direction with good solar orientation and the sea in the horizon…
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