Residential Unit – Collective Housing
The area of intervention is located in Porto, between existing rear façades, and there was the need to create new accesses to the inside of the block, as well as new façades.
The principles for the proposal were to preserve the existing cork oaks and buildings, privatizing the space between the surrounding buildings and the new ones.
The project corresponds to a residential unit in which the dwellings are accessed off a shared horizontal access or gallery.
Concept. The gallery is not merely a corridor. The building has two galleries, one on the ground floor and one of the second floor, as the dwellings are duplex apartments.
So, on the ground floor, the gallery includes the access to the dwellings and a private outdoor space with natural light. The natural light that enters this private space creates a rhythm and dynamic that varies throughout the day.
The building consists of duplex apartments. The kitchen and living room are on the lower floor and the bedrooms, laundry room, and home office are on the upper floor.
The ground floor is different from the other floors, which are connected to the shared exterior space. On this floor, there are private spaces with natural light for each apartment, which allow creating a distance between the gallery and the residential space.
The rhythm of the west façade, with both protruding balconies and interior balconies, allows the exterior space to extend to the inside of the house and vice-versa.
The material chosen for the façades is plaster, painted in grey and white in areas that need to be illuminated, and glass fiber reinforced concrete is used to wrap the base of the ground floor giving it unity and continuity.
The birch flooring, the marble on the kitchen walls, the white walls and the wood paneling on the stairs create different atmospheres in different areas of the dwelling.
Architectural project by Architect Vânia Silva