PORTO, PORTUGAL 2009

The land on which the project is inscribed, contained to the south by the high walls of the Paranhos Cemetery, is bounded along the entire perimeter by a hedge of large trees that decisively reinforce the atmosphere of interiority and containment already mentioned by the topography. To the west, an area of vegetable gardens, testifies to the rural genesis of this area of the city, whose property structure was, in times, determined by the farms that surrounded the urban crown.
The new intervention proposes to grant the building a relative autonomy and isolation and at the same time promote the consolidation of the street fronts, thus contributing to the consolidation of the spatial unity of the campus. The relationship with the riverside park is purposefully privileged and, therefore, the front of the lot, which borders the southeast and southwest streets, is delimited by a basement wall that contains a garden platform, on which the building is located. . The topography thus reinforces the possibility of withdrawing the building in relation to road traffic. The roof of the two buildings will be covered with a thick geotextile compound, fertilized with organic matter from the land of the existing vegetable gardens and the excavated volume, thus integrating the fertile soil into its composition, which is increasingly a resource of great ecological value in the the interior of the urban space, metaphorically evoking the limits of human knowledge and its temporal condition – alluding to the theme of the program of this building and the agricultural memory of the “place”.