This is a project of tense duality between vernacular principles and a neoplastic understating of shape, place and landscape.
In a naturally fragmented and disconnected context, the Gafarim House offers monolithic, opaque volumes to the street, citing the compact, parallelepipedic masses of northern Portuguese popular architecture and adjusting its scale to the surroundings.
It appears with autonomy in its context -an independent object among independent objects- and, in its economy of shape and detailing, it distances itself from the post-rural decorativism that is the norm in today’s Portuguese countryside.
The Dovecote-Granary is a place of serenity and introspection, where one can establish a strong connection with both nature and oneself. Without a conventional function the space is its own purpose: a treehouse-temple of sorts.
Having as a starting point a shoe store built in the late ’90s, this new commercial space—which targets a very specific (and demanding) market with a wide range of products—required a project designed to have great flexibility in the presentation of the products, generate a space with a strong, recognizable and repeatable image, while achieving it at a very low cost.
The ‘Casa de Magalhães Nursery School’ is located near the ‘Casa de Magalhães Home for the Elderly’, sharing some functionalities like public access, parking and a few services. The nursery school building arises from a volume displacement that is subtracted from the home for the elderly base building, allowing the creation of a courtyard and, at the same time, the new building for the children. Although both buildings take different languages, they share the same DNA, the same “skin”, which results in some common principles like privacy, security, intimacy and comfort. The initial volumetry of the set brings us to the cyclic process of life itself, as a metaphor of the aging process; from small to big, from simple to complex.
The project of Quartéis de Santa Justa is located at the highest point of Monte de Santa Justa, in Ponte de Lima (Portugal) and have, besides the chapel, a structure that served as a shelter for pilgrims.
Article source: Carvalho Araújo, Arquitectura e Design
The complex design has an unlikely morphology for a cattle market, away from the massive image of the prefabricated pavilions. Located near the town, it releases the closure of the urban fabric so another more appropriate equipment can do it. Its function is another: the transition between the immediate rurality of the suburbs and the historic center of Ponte de Lima. The new complex cohabits with palaces, gardens and chapels, and its structure composes an orthogonal grid that relates to the existing routes and reinforces the visual relationship with the river.
The Earth Market is something bigger than the cattle fair and market, than the horse fair or Expolima, it comes from a wider ambition to create a network of “structures”, sporadic and localized interventions of a smaller or larger scale, but precise and of ”exact measurements”.
Paço de Vitorino is a manor house located in the north of Portugal that has been in the same family since the mid-16th century. It’s history is marked several relevant events. The most outstanding dates from the mid-18th century when a major intervention occurred according to baroque canons. The resulting structure is characterized by a three stories main house on the east side, two lateral wings on the north and south side and a small chapel along the entrance wall on the west. These elements delineate a central large yard defined by adorned facades.
Article source: Topos Atelier de Arquitectura, Lda
The Golf Hotel integrates a set of equipments from the Ponte de Lima’s golf course.
From this set of equipments, designed by Topos Atelier, the clubhouse was built between 1993 and 1995 while the touristic village, with 86 dwellings and started in 1995, is now complete.
The hillside terrain, sloping to the west, for the construction of the hotel, stretches from the touristic village (south) to the clubhouse (north).
When Ponte de Lima Municipal Market was built in 1927 it was the cause of public discussions concerning the pros and cons of its location, although no negative remarks seem to have been made about its elegant design.
70 years later we can still see its somewhat domineering relationship, from the height of its granite base, with the city centre and the avenue of plane trees.
Article source: J M Carvalho Araújo Arquitectura e Design
Inside a white house lives a lady without progeny. She donates the land, home and attachments to build a home for the elderly. She only requires that the construction be done prior to her death. It all starts from the house; it is the center and the symbol.
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