PER Social Housing Program
Lugar do Outeiro
Maia
1996-1999
The place where this apartments block is implanted is situated inside a “quarter” of low density located in a close area to downtown.
This condition of interiority confirms the incipience of an urban forum that manifests evident articulation difficulties, where it is unequivocal the absence of any strategy of urban design.
Such situation defines the complexity that the project has to face and to try to solve since the "location” and the image of the building can only, in this case, result of the commitment that is necessary to establish between the scale that it proposes and the scale that characterises the close neighbourhood.
The building is implanted on the opposite side to the entrance inside the “quarter” in order to be directly related with the existing Telephonic Exchange building, contributing this way for the “establishment of a regularity” of the place’s interior limits.
The adoption of the same material (brick) used in that building doesn't represent more than an approach in the sense of reinforcing that “establishment of a regularity" and also as form of establishing with it an identity.
The austerity, the economy of means and the rigour that characterise the design is summed up in an image of unity and consistence while reinforcement of that same identity.
The conceptual foundation of the building is based in the idea of a piece of an urban territory that must be internally articulate, capable to generate a collective and balanced occupation of the external free spaces, where the relationship between courses and those spaces allows to establish the necessary hierarchy.
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