PER - Social Housing Complex
Vila Nova da Telha, Maia
The land the housing complex occupies is located in a territory whose morphology results from the unrestrained accumulation of successive lots, the basis of which is not only purely speculative, but it can also be characterized by the absence of any effort to order and define a hierarchy in public space.
The physical constraints of the land, embedded between a public street and the train tracks, as well as its frontal position, facing the pseudo “civic centre” endowed with some centrality, are conditions that cannot be ignored by the master plan of the project.
Although the living manner that the program imposes is distinct to that, which predominantly occupies this portion of the territory (single-family homes), the project searches to not only elude the limited land available, but also to contradict the “centrality” that its location somewhat indicates.
The project proposes an approach that refuses an affirmation, always preferring anonymity as opposed to any kind of exposure.
The regularity with which the buildings are disposed along the public street, and the way they are grouped so as to shape their own exterior space (courtyards), demonstrates an effort to articulate the scale of the complex with its immediate surroundings.
The density and the permeability that simultaneously characterize the complex portray a compromise where the essential and the rigour are the expression of the simplicity that is pursued.
This, because simplicity is always and only apparent, almost always hiding the complexity with which it is made, being that the truly simple is obtained exclusively through the concentration of that same complexity.
