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.
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.
In 1880, the opening of the Douro railway line provided an alternative to waterway transport. Travellers, but more particularly Port wines and the products necessary to produce them, benefitted from the two hundred kilometres of rail tracks connecting the Spanish border and the city of Porto. Between 1988 and 1990, the last 28 kilometres of this railway and several sections of tributary lines (including Tua), considered insufficiently lucrative, were closed. In 2008, operation of the Tua line ceased entirely. The construction of a dam on the Tua River, approved the following year and requiring 16 kilometres of railway tracks to be flooded, made any re-use of the service definitively impossible.
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A 49 sqm store is located in a 1st generation shopping mall that tries to resist to the abandonedment. Due to its location in the city center there is still some activity although part of the occupation are shops marked by successive transformations that create a palette of suburbanity.
The project itself is ambitious in its attempt of integration by promoting a performative, stylized, simplified space that contrasts in all its valences with its surroundings.
An actual interpretation of the Mediterranean Modernist Architecture in a balanced fusion with Portuguese Cubist Architecture references. A pure white minimalistic contemporary family house located at Quinta dos Salicos, Carvoeiro, Algarve (Portugal). Based on a natural organic layout design, the main shape (trapezoidal) of the building is following the plot’s itself shape and directing the different facades for the most efficient, sunny and pleasant views, in a constant open visual and physical relation between indoor and outdoor spaces (natural fusion).
A concept with pure straight lines, uniform colors (white), flat roofing (living terraces) and volumes shaped by the irregular angles and defined by the relation between light/shade over the irregular volumes setting. A building concept following an eco-friendly approach based on optimizing the climate and natural lighting/ventilation conditions.
On a return to the origins, the challenge of a tricky complex site waits for us, these that lead to the best projects. A small village full of irregularity, with a field of view marked by miscellaneous rooftops.
In the distance the impressiveness of the city tower contrasts with the featureless construction on the side.
Located in Av. da Liberdade. Lisbon´s luxury stores destination, Liberdade 40 is a retrofitting project that results of the rehabilitation of a former office building with an inefficient use, into 16 modern, exclusive and minimalist apartments. This project allowed the closing of the outer arcade, wining critical square meters for the developer.
This profound rehabilitation with an emphasis on the neutral colors and modern straight lines, deeply transformed this 1980s’ building now featuring a cosmopolitan discretion that makes all the difference.
Nestled in the picturesque landscape of the Algarve coastline, on a hill between wild thyme and rosemary, this low energy house was built for a family based in Germany. The family had been coming to this area for 30 years and finally decided to build their own holiday home. For the retired couple it was important to create a ground-level living area. Their previous holiday home, spread over two floors, made it difficult to use with their older age.
As architects, CORE team was required to design a single-story house that allows communicative living on one level, but at the same time blends gently into the steep hillside allotment. The access to the garden was required to be comfortable and effortless.
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.
The former Topázio’s Factory site results from the relocation of the previous Emídio Navarro Avenue unit, in the Coimbra city center, to Pedrulha’s Industrial Area in the late 1950’s.
The strong presence of this building in the former National Road 1, currently known as Rua Manuel Madeira, can be seen, mainly, on its elevation extended along the way, with a modern language where the horizontality and the repetitive rhythm, given by the openings and friezes, are outstanding. On the other hand, the vertical gestures of the tower used to protect the Silos, attached to the transparent Manufacturing Room, and of the limestone wall where the institutional masts are anchored, appear in clear contrast on both east and west ends of the elevation, respectively.
Lead Architect: Alexandre Saraiva Dias, Maria Amália Freitas
Collaborators: Tiago Nunes da Costa, Daniela Santos, Luis Salazar, Miguel Serpa Oliva, Daniel Gameiro, Ana do Vale Lopes, Elísio Graça, Nuno Pereira, Paulo Teixeira, João Portugal, Rui Santos, João Lopes
Tags: Coimbra, Portugal Comments Off on Headquarters and Logistic Centre of the Plural Pharmacy Cooperative in Coimbra, Portugal by ORANGE arquitectura
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