In the development of the implantation area, between the upper level of the cemetery and the lower level of the centennial olive grove, allowing for the maintenance of the existing views system and fitting into the territory between traditional dry-stone walls, the Mortuary House of Barrancos is developed.

Exterior interventions are promoted to enhance the intervention area – parking and access – through the construction of pavements, retaining walls, and new landscaping to counteract the “heat island” effect, minimizing the visual impact of the existing infrastructures.

The proposed intervention thus responds not only to the competition statement and program but also to the challenges of the climate, integrates the existing vegetation, and adapts to the morphology of the place, in a perfect articulation between architecture and territory. Between the high point of the existing lookout and the access level to the building, a public square is constructed, open to the landscape, which encourages gathering. At its base, supporting it, is the foundation covered with local schist stone, which embraces the constructed building and highlights the white bodies of the funeral chapels, the tank that reflects the landscape, and the “light well” that illuminates the atrium present on the lower floor.

La entrada Casa Mortuária Barrancos se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This is a small house that feels larger than it is, yet lacks nothing essential for the domestic lives of its inhabitants. From this perspective, it is a house as all houses ought to be.

Through a typological journey, we arrived at a design that reconstructs the house much ‘as found’ — though turned upside down. The bedrooms lie below, nestled between the street and a quiet courtyard, each with its own degree of privacy. The entrance hall, with its eccentric geometry, offers a surprising accessibility and a rare generosity for a dwelling of this dimension. The main living space occupies the entire upper floor, underneath the existing pitched roof. Here, the house opens up to its best views, potentiates cross-ventilation, and a more generous ceiling height celebrated by plasterboard catenaries shaped on site — shaped on site by chance and by the workers’ hands.´

La entrada House in Valongo se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The project consisted of rehabilitating a building on the corner of Rua Marques de Ponte de Lima and Beco dos Três Engenhos in Lisbon’s Mouraria neighbourhood. The pre-Pombaline building, whose trapezoidal configuration was the result of successive transformations of a patio, has had various uses throughout its existence.

During archaeological research, mills related to the production and milling of flour were discovered in the basement, explaining the name of the place where the building is located, which translates as Alley of the Three Mills. After being used as a flour mill, the building was used as a tavern and later as a workshop.

La entrada 113 Three Mills se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The operation focuses on a rural building for agricultural use of pasture land and irrigated arable cropping.
The existing buildings, in granite stone masonry, were vacant and in an advanced state of disrepair. They comprised a two-storey house, an oven integrated into a single-story building, two granaries and a threshing floor.

The proposal intends to restore and extend the existing buildings, transforming them into an enterprise for tourism in rural areas.

The house (A) is fully restored, taking advantage of the existing structure, installing the main program – the core of rooms – suitable both for the size of the existing spaces, as well as for the distribution made through the gallery around the patio. The restoration included the reinforcement of the granite masonry, the introduction of structural wooden slabs, plasterboard walls inside, thermal insulation and wooden exterior window frames and the reconstitution of a roof with a new wooden structure and marseille tile.

La entrada Rural house in Soutelos se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This small building will replace an auxiliary structure of the estate that has collapsed irreparably. The maximum size of its footprint, the main features of its volume, and the roofing material—ceramic tile—are inherited from the volume it replaces due to regulatory reasons. The project also incorporates characteristic elements that connect it with the language of other buildings on the estate, such as the chimney and the proportion of some windows.

La entrada Gatehouse and Garage se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

That was the perfect place to escape. A shelter in the hills of Mafra grounded in a different time and space.

A big long house, once split in two. Other parts came along the main street, hiding the view over the landscape as the evidence of this collage was latent in the contrast between brick and the shale masonry. Inside, the concrete floor slab fractioned the old cellar and the windows arbitrarily teared the thin brick facade creating a high contrast with the deep openings in the stone masonry walls.Nonetheless, the scars these transformations have inflicted were as violent as they were precious, and therefore worth preserving.

In the middle of a long white surface, three steps announce the entrance. Inside, the program follows the rhythm of the different levels, elevating the atrio and creating a hinge between the social and the private area. Behind it, a core a bath room is revealed. Its arch vault, its stone partition and an enigmatic Fibonacci window create an atmosphere of contemplation.

La entrada Codeçal House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The setting for the new school was based on two essential conditions. The first condition was that it had to be as close as possible to the old school for reasons of mobility. The second condition was that the dance studios had to have a clear relationship with the outside space, as a mental and physical release strategy for the dancers.

The Site

By coincidence, less than 50 meters away from the old school there was a vacant lot. This lot, with a reduced area and inserted in a non-consolidated sector of the city, where collective housing buildings, public garden space and agricultural land coexists, characterizes a hybrid context where trees manage to be the great protagonists. The setting of the building sought the maximum areas allowed, in which the geometry of the lot limits became the mold that gave origin to the architectural volume, the position of openings look for the trees that discipline the so desired views over the outside.

The Program

The compatibilization between there quirements of the mandatory spaces to belong to the public dance education network, with the restrictions imposed by the urbanistic legislation concerning areas, was the main problem to be solved. The spatial solution is based on the geometric configuration of the lot’s limits, a trapezoid made up of a rectangleand two right-angled triangles. The rectangular spaces form the boundaries ofthe main dance spaces, the studios and the changing rooms. The triangular spaces form the limits of the service and circulation spaces. This compactness of the program made it possible to create double-height spaces that communicate visually with each other through large interior windows that double the spatial sensation. The openings placed at the vertices of the triangles allow the green exterior of the garden to always be the main setting in the circulation spaces.

The Idea

The desire for architecture and dance to merge into a common art. In which the rigor and the rules that discipline the rigid limits of the matter of form and the form of space, evoke the beauty of the body in movement. To complete the dance stage we can only thank the assiduous presence of the trees as attentive spectators of the show.

Text provided by the architect.

La entrada Ballet School se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

This was the first building to be transformed at the Quinta da Ponte complex. It is part of a row of buildings along the perimeter wall of the estate, and their sunken ground floor spaces, having been excavated in the terrain, were previously small shops that only opened onto the main façade. This buildings upper floor, which could not be accessed from the one below, was a single-floor apartment mostly cut off from the estate.

La entrada Tenant House se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The pre-existing granary stood in a terrain that was, in the meantime, sold, and the owner craved to transfer it to a new location, converting it into a house. Its dimension, however, was unable to fulfil the project’s programme.

Having to choose between the absolute loyalty to the pre-existent, necessarily requiring extension, or its reinterpretation in a new model that would preserve its essence, we favoured this second approach. And so, the granary was reborn, adding two modules to the four primitive ones and taking advantage of some parts derived from other demolition work. In its reconstruction we kept the granite wall as a structural component and a framework of steel and wood in the upper floor and roof was adopted. In a model mainly marked by a widely open façade, we also focused on its orientation, facing it South.

The indentation of the glazing units derives primarily from the idea of the granary’s new façade. Dimensioned for the retractable exterior shutters, this indentation simultaneously avoids the direct commitment of the glazed frames with the granite structure, choosing to reinterpret, on those same louvered doors, the formal meaning of the wooden slatted plans that filled the spans of the granary.

La entrada Granary reconstruction se publicó primero en Global Spaces.

The work, of the still called Quinta do Mitra, is an integral part of the project for the Campanhã’s Bus Terminal (TIC). Its outer space is an integral part of, as well as an extension of the public natural park that already involves all this intervention. It goes from the south area, next to the Ceres Factory, and it extends along the entire TIC building, stretching eastwards to Rua do Bonjoia up to the site of the former Quinta do Mitra, with access via a pedestrian bridge, at the north end of the TIC complex. The pre-existing building of an extensive Quinta that was, over time, successively and very closely involved by large mobility infrastructures (the railway, the ring road and now the TIC), was completely abandoned, not fully functional, in ruins and in an advanced state of structural degradation, close to collapse.

The TIC project envisaged its reconstruction in order to make it a functional building, to confer an urban sense to it and make it an active player in the new functional and infrastructural surrounding context. The architectural proposal focused on the integral preservation of the existing stone walls, maintaining the condition in which they were found, the appearance of a ruin, reconfiguring their spaces for a new programmatic and multipurpose functionality: Transformed it into a municipal services building, complying with the new spatial, constructive and infrastructural requirements.

La entrada Quinta do Mitra se publicó primero en Global Spaces.