ArchShowcase Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. RESTAURANT + TEA HOUSE in Oporto, Portugal by FRANCISCO PORTUGAL E GOMESJune 24th, 2014 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: FRANCISCO PORTUGAL E GOMES This work is located in the granite peak of Antas in the south side facing the valley of Campanhã. The toponymy evokes that in this place megalithic funerary monuments (Dolmens) will have existed, but this is one of the areas of Oporto city that more suffered with the successive transformations of the last decades, as, to point out, the construction of the new Dragon Stadium, inserted in the Detail Plan of Antas (1999-2003) and the construction of the road junction of Via de Cintura Interna / Antas, which occurred in the 80s of the XX century. This last process resulted in the demolition of the northern half of the Vasques de Mesquita Street and in the southern half only a part where the work is located resisted.
In the early 50s, it was here that the enthusiastic supporters of Futebol Clube do Porto met, to watch (from outside) the games offered in the former Stadium of Antas, now demolished, an authorship of the architect Francisco Oldemiro Carneiro. From this period there is also a house, designed by the same architect, at an early stage of review of the Modern, which is very rooted in the rocky outcrop, with the covering inverted roofs and surrounded by indigenous vegetation. The “Spirit of the Place” was taken into account in the difficult union that can be established between the recent memory and the ancestral memory: the first, related to the game (natural bench facing a field where sporting events occur) and the second, which refers to the evocation of the missing megalithic dolmens (created by a gallery access, camera and flagstone of coverage on balance, supported on vertical bearers). Of this “delicate” union was born the intervention in the lot, that although depending on the street, it is mainly manifested in the relationship that looks to establish with the interior of the block, where there is good sunlight, varied vegetation and the garden of the neighbour house, previously referred to, through which you can see the landscape, cut by a staircase launched on the emptiness, in a diagonal line, that livens up the entire garden and the movement in the outer space. In this context, and regarding the dissonance introduced with the program, it was tried to respect the domestic tranquillity of the block and to evoke the current memory and the ancestral spiritual memory. Contact FRANCISCO PORTUGAL E GOMES
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