The Alferes Malheiro Street starts at Largo Tito Fontes, showing us the central city, step by step, almost in a quiet hypnotizing thriler. The south point draws a skyline with the tower of the Trindade, seeing as if the centre lays itself under the tower, forgetting about all the architectural and urban transformations that the city has suffered, where co-exist ruptures and interpretations of the traditional architecture.
Architecturally, with the rehabilitation of the facade and the new proposal of volume, it contributes to the consolidation of the character of the street, completing the height of the buildings on the street and the dominant alignment. The biggest change is the adding of more floors (The North building has ground floor plus three and the South building has ground floor plus two), redrawing the east facade, faced by the street and increasing the height in order to reach the same as the aside building.
“Roriz Social Project” take place to serve the population.
The study focused on public use sanitary facilities in need of urgent intervention. A previously degraded and dysfunctional space whose requalification is based on three fundamental principles: the space functionality, the limit budget imposed and respect for the context, spirit and history of this place.
The project entire development came from a clear functional problem, the access to a storage room, made through the entrance into the men’s toilets. In response to this problem, the project was developed around the creation of a single entrance into the building, which assumes itself as an extension of the public road to its interior and gives direct access to the storage room, it’s through this new “inner street” that the access to the men’s and women’s toilets is made.
The unsuitable proportion obtained by using the square shape of its 18x18m area with a maximum height of 28 m determined the search for a solution that would counteract this. The use of the building structure itself, making it visible in its perimeter elements in addition to the stairway and elevator box, provided the solution for this vertical direction through the execution of a high blade set, with perfect articulation between the structural component and the architectural design
The reconstitution of the timeline shows that, in fact, we are not facing a building, but two buildings that have evolved into a single building. The initial building may have been erected in the late 14th or 15th centuries. Surely, it could only have been erected only after the “opening” of Rua Nova, or Rua Formosa (now Rua do Infante), ordered by D. João I (1357-1433). During the period “almadino” gained this neoclassical facade. In the twentieth century the pair Carlos Loureiro and Padua Ramos designed a modernist staircase of extreme elegance. When it came to us, all we had to do was to respect all these layers that had struck a remarkable balance there. It was a bank. Before that there were many things: offices, insurance firms, warehouse. Someone’s house in the early days. Now it’s a hotel. We do not know tomorrow. We know, however, that whoever comes next will continue to be able to recognize this timeline in the building. And if all goes well, you will not realize that we were there.
The project was initiated by a commission to refurbish a traditional 17th century residential building in Porto city centre. It was a three-storey building with a large and complex courtyard in different levels (due to the steep topography of the city), which was completely covered by poorly built and insalubrious shacks. During the design process, the adjoining building (from a different owner) was added to the project, and later, another small building already existing in the courtyard was also included. In total, the project comprises 6 small apartments (2 studios, 2 one bedroom flats and 2 one bedroom duplexes), a shop and a (pre-existing) restaurant.
Architects: clínica de arquitectura (Clínica de Arquitectura® (architects Nuno Travasso + Pedro Geraldes + João Silva + Sofia Granjo + Margarida Leitão + Tiago Reis +) with Inês Pimentel)
The Urbo Business Centre is a building for offices and services located in Matosinhos, in the Metropolitan Area of Porto.
Characterised by the single volume, with a detached implantation of rectangular geometry, the building is inserted in a corner plot with about 6000m2.
With a total construction area of 25600m2, the building comprises a total of eight floors, six of which above ground for offices, and two basement floors with 200 underground parking spaces, with the exception of an area on the west side on the 1st floor, also on the basement level, suitable for service providers.
Article source: JOÃO ARAÚJO SOUSA & JOANA CORREIA SILVA ARQUITECTURA
The project makes an extensive renovation and expansion of a mid-century townhouse close to Porto´s city center. The original two floor dwelling was built in 1950 in a joint operation with the two adjacent buildings. During the course of years the house was transformed in random operations, striped from the original layout and qualifying architectural elements. The project faced the challenge of converting the neglected interior spaces into a contemporary environment with an economically sustainable approach.
429 Foz Housing is a residential building with 4 apartments spread over 5 floors. Located in Oporto´s Foz do Douro area it has East / West orientation and is inserted in an urban area in consolidation next to the Atlantic Ocean.
The accesses to the building are made from the East by the Gondarém street where also the bedrooms are and the backyard is oriented to the West where the social areas are located.
The project derives from the need of rehabilitating a semi-detached house, integrated in a State subsidized neighbourhood built in the second half of the 1950s. Its location, next to a large urban area, has become attractive for younger families. However, due to the small scale of the house and considerable partitioning of interior spaces, it was necessary to intervene in order to increase the living areas and to update them to a more modern way of utility. The expansion of the living space was then thought through the redefinition of the pre-existing rooms and the use of the exterior space, with the construction of an autonomous volume, which is assumed as a new archetype, different from the affordable house of the 1950s. Functionally, the bedrooms remain in the pre-existing building, while the extension receives the social spaces. The strategy of the project was based on this separation between the two constructions, emphasizing the language and materiality that the new detached volume assumes, with a clear allusion to the work of Mies van der Rohe. This light and transparent construction presents itself as a counterpoint to the compact volume of stone basement and roof. Together, one archetype does not cancel the other, being that they complement each other and value their identity by matching the different ages of the neighbourhood. The point of mediation and connection between the two distinct moments of the house is marked by the entrance door.
This project consists in the transformation of a small apartment inserted in a XIX century building located at the historical center of Porto. Given the small dimension of the space and the customer’s specifications to increase the useful area, the proposal is based on the design of a mezzanine over the central space, taking advantage of the characteristic high ceilings of this period´s constructions. The intermediate floor created by the mezzanine integrates a main bedroom and an additional bedroom space, both open towards the living room, but also separate and hidden. The lower floor develops into the living, dining room and kitchen. The remaining service spaces like the bathroom and storage are concentrated in the surplus interior area.
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