São Bento Residences
The São Bento Residences project is located on a notable corner of Porto’s Historic Centre, next to São Bento Station, just a few meters from the main cathedral and the city’s central avenue. This corner results from a 1930’s demolition plan of an extensive side of Rua do Loureiro (18th century street) for the development of a modern road axis: Avenida D. Afonso Henriques. This axis generated an open “wound” in the city centre, an urban void that exposed a granite escarpment (resulting from the demolition), presently maintained and requalified by the municipality as a landscape fragment.
The project seeks to establish a continuity between al those different historical layers, but also a balanced relationship between the façade of the old station and the stone mass of the escarpment. The proposed solution links those “monumental” and “residential” scales, but also those “artificial” and “natural” materialities. A monolithic block, built in exposed concrete, hammered “in situ”, conforms itself, not only to the shape of the escarpment, but also of the pre-existing 18th century building, whose remains, in granite stone, are safeguarded.
In response to the program required by the client - sixteen apartments, between T0 and T1 typologies - the block accomplishes two purposes, translated into two distinct volumes: one of them absorbs and complements, by affinity, the stone façade of Rua do Loureiro; the other inaugurates a new front on Avenida D. Afonso Henriques. A “gap” between the two volumes marks the entrance, reception and vertical accesses to the different apartments. Four of those apartments fill up the volume that contains the 18th century façades; the rest are distributed in the new volume, which interior spaces are marked by concrete niches, but also by different views of the urban surroundings, observed through the new windows and balconies. On the ground floor, a restaurant space relates both volumes.
The rhythmic composition of the façade on Avenida D. Afonso Henriques reinvents the vertical proportions of Porto’s traditional architecture. This façade protrudes over the public space through a kind of loggia, a common solution in other notable buildings of Porto’s downtown. From these buildings, the project rescues the exquisite use of brass, in the delicate composition of the new balconies and ground floor window frames, in contrast to the façade’s beton brut.
Between the integration into the surrounding buildings and escarpment, and the affirmation of its contemporaneity, the São Bento Residences project seeks to build a conceptual link between the 18th and 21st centuries.
The project seeks to establish a continuity between al those different historical layers, but also a balanced relationship between the façade of the old station and the stone mass of the escarpment. The proposed solution links those “monumental” and “residential” scales, but also those “artificial” and “natural” materialities. A monolithic block, built in exposed concrete, hammered “in situ”, conforms itself, not only to the shape of the escarpment, but also of the pre-existing 18th century building, whose remains, in granite stone, are safeguarded.
In response to the program required by the client - sixteen apartments, between T0 and T1 typologies - the block accomplishes two purposes, translated into two distinct volumes: one of them absorbs and complements, by affinity, the stone façade of Rua do Loureiro; the other inaugurates a new front on Avenida D. Afonso Henriques. A “gap” between the two volumes marks the entrance, reception and vertical accesses to the different apartments. Four of those apartments fill up the volume that contains the 18th century façades; the rest are distributed in the new volume, which interior spaces are marked by concrete niches, but also by different views of the urban surroundings, observed through the new windows and balconies. On the ground floor, a restaurant space relates both volumes.
The rhythmic composition of the façade on Avenida D. Afonso Henriques reinvents the vertical proportions of Porto’s traditional architecture. This façade protrudes over the public space through a kind of loggia, a common solution in other notable buildings of Porto’s downtown. From these buildings, the project rescues the exquisite use of brass, in the delicate composition of the new balconies and ground floor window frames, in contrast to the façade’s beton brut.
Between the integration into the surrounding buildings and escarpment, and the affirmation of its contemporaneity, the São Bento Residences project seeks to build a conceptual link between the 18th and 21st centuries.
Atelier Pedra Líquida
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