The site under study is part of the Serrinha Urbanization Plan, Rebordosa, where the City Council plans to build a multi-purpose exhibition park to publicize the city’s business activities in order to make business dynamics more competitive and that the City Hall intends to provide support and continuity in a strategic vision, with a broad influence beyond the territorial limits of the municipality of Paredes.

The Project defines an architectural solution with a vision of a building that, in addition to the strictly functional sense of a multipurpose business exhibition park, enables symbolic communication capable of being an important reference in communication and in adhering to environmental quality concerns, landscape and urban integration of the municipality of Paredes, in a contemporary perspective.

With the conception of this Project, it is intended to obtain a functional space that structures and values ​​an entire business area that the plan envisages and that is intended to be in fact the driving force of the high potential that this Municipality has been showing posible.

The areas of intervention DEX focus mainly on creating environments or spaces governed by the principles of sustainability and innovation.

Our interventions seek to create systems that interrelate the countryside and humanized in constant search for a symbiosis between the parties and ensuring the creation of cohesive and harmonious spaces.

DEX conducts studies and projects within the landscape architecture and urban planning. The scope of work areas is ensured by the active participation of a multitude of professionals who respond efficiently to customer needs and ensuring the quality and performance of the services in full respect for the environment.

The landscape is subject to several transformations and has numerous features that will instill a unique character. DEX want to be a pioneer in terms of environmental and urban regeneration and a precursor to actions that ensure the continuous improvement of standards of care and quality at both the countryside and the built environment.

We serve the landscape, we serve the human being!

The Centro de Interpretação Ambiental do Rio Vez (Environmental Interpretive Centre of the Vez River) bears witness to a strategic vision for the sustainable development of the Arcos de Valdevez Municipality to add value to the town’s natural resources and heritage. This is an iconic building, a clear investment by the municipality in ecological and innovative environmental tourism, with scientific backing. In this sense it tries to create an identity and become a driving force for various companies, visits and research, thus connecting the municipality to different international research centres.

More than a building, this project seeks to be a public meeting space, of reference to the population and its visitors, and as such to reflect a respect for nature. Therefore, the project is articulated with the river and maintains a relationship of proximity and reciprocity with it. It combines the idea of innovation and the idea of interaction with the landscape; technology in dialogue with nature in a process of mutual respect for history, traditions and the present that the architecture attempts to embody.

The project is set in a place where the river gets close to the urban agglomeration. The river is included in the design of an outdoor plaza at the end of the town’s main avenue, which becomes a unique and welcoming place to meet and contemplate the surroundings, the river, its people and inimitable landscape. This is the true heritage that this project wants to protect and share. 

An interplay of volumes based on the repetition and grouping of a module was the theme behind this project. Owing to the demands of the programme and the constraints of the terrain, we arranged these modules around a central courtyard. The result was an irregular, dynamic and complex body, which created multiple and varied areas for play, reflection and learning.

The central courtyard presents itself as an empty space, a unifying element and a catalyst for experiences. In the words of Lao Tzu, it is the empty space that makes the wheel turn. Here it is the joint that connects and makes the body, apparently fragmented and comprising seemingly random volumes, unified. The glass has a double function: it enables the interior to turn outwards, extending its boundaries, while at the same time it marks and reveals the interplay and contrast of volumes that characterise this building.

Similarly, the interior reveals the same contrast of shapes and volumes, of areas for circulation and rest on the winding paths around the courtyard, which provides protection and brings the indoors out. Inside the colourful and bright classrooms the irregular roofs of the volumes that shape them are recreated, making these spaces distinctive, unique and distinguished, just as the children who attend this school.

Constructing on top of the already built is a challenge that is always presented to the architect and increasingly the new architecture. Rehabilitation, recovery and restoration of buildings or heritage are nowadays a fundamental field of work for the development of our profession. 

Architecture is always built on something that already exists; on a past, a territory, on a piece of land or a pre-existing building and never on a void or a shallow board. This school centre is an example of this. It is built on the basis of an existing school which has recovered and remained in its essence and only new modules, new accesses and different materials have been added. 

The Paredes School Centre arose from the need to restore and rehabilitate a school built on a prefabricated degraded structure which no longer had the quality and comfort to carry out its activity.

From the understanding of the recovery and expansion needs, it was proposed the addition of three new volumes capable of responding to the spatial and programmatic needs required and above all to be able to unify the entire volume without losing the existing pavilion matrix and which we seek to explore as a concept, image or identity for this new building. A volumetric composition based on a process of adding pure and juxtaposed volumes, with distinct identities and forms, associated to a subtle articulation of covers as and voids, accompanied by work on the creation of different exterior spaces and the composition of new covering materials, are the elements that characterise the intervention.

The aim is to create a school with its own personality and identity, using the existing elements, drawing a dynamic and stimulating silhouette to the whole set that wants to be renewed, updated and only for this reason different.

The school centre in Rebordosa is designed around a central courtyard. A sober and distinctive volume that contrasts with a place full of references, shapes and colours. The school is thought of as a redoubt of containment and integration, a reference point for other and different architectures that are experienced and that confront each other here.

The method of composition was not one of adding volumes, or plans, or other elements for the construction of the whole that makes up the shape of the building. On the contrary, we started from a stable element, a rectangular shape that the contingencies and setbacks of the terrain acted as a real condition for the definition of its implantation.

In this way, the process of conception and construction of form became almost sculptural. The pure, enclosed and raw volume is carved into the matter, searching for the essential, adjusting, cutting and adapting parts to make the whole emerge.

In this game of subtraction, spaces are created, spans are torn, the body is given to an architecture made of light and shadow. It is in this context that the courtyard appears, in the centre of the building and over which the remaining spaces develop. It is from this desire to create diversified spaces that the covered outdoor playgrounds emerge, watching over those who pass by and guarding those who shelter in them. From the vertical incisions in the walls, light emerges to the inside, reflecting the life and colour that the concrete walls contain, revealing a little of the fluid and colourful interior space, contradicting the denser and more closed image of the outside.

Two parallelepipeds confront each other in a delicate twisting movement, seems to be the theme of this work.

This project is based on an idea of inhabiting dynamic and differentiating: two volumes of concrete associated with another, central and lower that unites them.

A singular house built with the same exterior material, white concrete, a closed volume that opens strategically in punctual glazing, balconies and coverings that create different relationship spaces between the interior and the exterior.

From the play of different volumes we obtain an enormous variety of spaces, all differentiated and each of them characterized in a unique way. The house, of a clear functionality, is a reinterpretation of the new ways of living allowing its inhabitants a multiplicity of uses and occupations.

Of grandiose expression, yet small, prominent yet contained, brutalist yet delicate, this is a work that seems to want to question some concepts, taken for granted.