Article source: Bernardo Amaral Arquitectura e Urbanismo
This nineteenth-century townhouse placed in Porto’s historical center was recently transformed by a real estate developer into a collective housing building with 8 apartments (studios, one and two-bedroom apartments). Having kept the existing central staircase and its lightwell, each apartment has one sole front, either facing the street or the backyard. The refurbishment project focuses on one of these apartments, located on the penultimate floor and facing South. Despite the narrow lot and irregular shape, we tried to re-organize the interior space taking advantage of it’s potential for a two-bedroom apartment.
A flat renovation is a bit of an architectural exercise.
It misses the stress facing the empty paper. It misses the urban dimension. It misses the expression of the big individual options. It misses the complexity, time and length of the full narrative. It is about rewriting a tale: few characters, a limited space and in a brief timeline.
According to Eça, “in a tale everything needs to be exposed with a clear and simple line: about the characters (…) only the obvious trace (…) that defines a personality; about feelings only what fits in a glance (…); about the landscape only what is far away, in a unique color ”.
This project cares to solve the uncharacterized and irregular geometry of the apartment, while at the same time showcasing some of its best qualities, such as the solar exposure and its relationship with the windows, balconies and the surrounding views. The ideal of the house as an urban refuge can be explored with a similar importance, stripped from the city buzz.
The Lisbon waterfront is an outstanding environment which is the setting for numerous work and leisure activities. Cultural and tourist attractions bring many visitors to Belém, and they need supporting infrastructures.
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.
In the hills of Monchique, between ups and downs, taking advantage of an extraordinary situation is this single-storey house. Set in a southern slope, with access by small and winding tar road, lies over one of several existing terraces that tear the steep slope into small cultivable levels.
It is in this scenario that one arrives to contemplate all the open view towards the Algarve coast and sea. The small hills are diluted as the distance increases and the entire path of the sun is visible from the edge of the pool.
The Canine & Feline Hotel is located in Parada, Vila do Conde and the main program consists of temporary dog and cat accommodation, a hotel where the animals stay for a few days, during holidays or professional travel of their owners. The remaining program is a complement to the space’s activity, with a veterinary office, a grooming room, outdoor training areas and a swimming pool for pets.
The program is distributed over three buildings that are interconnected, allowing to create three different areas. This way we got to separate the cat zone from the dog zone, avoiding the meeting of both and reducing the animal noises. In another building we find all the public service spaces.
The apartment is located closely to Parque Eduardo VII, a green area in Lisbon’s centre. Before being intervened, the apartment had been an office and its original features had already been distorted.
The proposal consisted in organizing the social area in two axes, both supported in the existing circulation structure: on one side, the meals and kitchen area, in the same alignment, and on the other side, a main corridor connecting the rooms and lounges.
The intervened house is placed in Bairro da Encarnação, a Lisbon’s neighborhood built in 1938, well-known by its twin-houses typology. The new house was totally rebuilt from scratch, maintaining only the main façade and the tile roof design exactly as the original ones.
Regarding the house volumetry, a new ‘L’ volume was added to the original house image, resulting in the proposed expansion which stands out from the original architecture and volumetry. The house extension was made by advancing the house over the patio, from the rear and side elevations, which were designed in a different architectonic language regarding the original one, distinguishing the “old” from the “new”.
This industrial warehouse is located in Águeda, Portugal, in an area without any architectural references and surrounded by forest.
With no relevant references and a layout which consists of a warehouse area for finished product storage, a cargo area and office space, the proposal is intended to reflect the simplicity of the solution, given the simplicity of the requirements.
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