Concurso Rave
Lavradio Station
Barreiro
2009
Barreiro’s recent past was marked by the heavy and largely scaled industry intensive’s presence. It’s an unavoidable memory, even admitting that part of the inhabitants doesn’t relate to it and also intend to ignore or even forget this “heritage”. However, it’s the facts and their succession what builds history and collective memory. Didn’t the industrial revolution define an architecture? Weren’t the mid and late 20th century railway stations one of the maxim expressions of that architecture? Weren’t those the same buildings that marked cities in their time and that, afterwards, defined the urban sense that characterizes what a “Gare” really is? Regardless of its own past and history, Barreiro cannot ignore History’s universality, where, as all other cities in the world, it will have its own place
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The station should be capable of embodying this local patrimony without forgetting that a universal patrimony also exists and that this last can (and should) also be its own. Only this way can the South Gare, Lavradio’s Station, aspire to be genuinely contemporary.
The Station’s building isn’t a building. It’s a kind of skin, a layer, which involves and hides the railway viaduct allowing it, this way, to become habitable. Its internal occupation is extremely simple since it is intended that the viaduct, covered to the outside, remains visible inside – the transparencies and the spatial continuities prevail so that its permeability may be effective, thus expressing its condition of articulating element, and also as a separation of the exterior spaces contiguous to it, to the west and to the east. This is also the reason why the program internal organisation is done trough the placing of loose and modular volumes, different in shape and revetment materials, which, because of the way in which they relate to the buildings structure end up defining the routes available for the user. This happens because a railway station is also movement – of people and trains.
