The genesis of the project is based on five guiding concepts: Maintain, Rehabilitate, Correct, Improve and Transform. It is through the interpretation and analysis of these assumptions that the following intervention proposal is designed.

As a point of departure it is intended to MAINTAIN all the elements considered characteristic and fundamental to the identity and uniqueness of this Church of ours. 

REABILITARY will be the second premise and will involve identifying the elements that need to be treated in order to be able to maintain, in accordance with the previous point.

CORRECTING the elements with the most functional problems is an essential concern of the intervention. Intervening in the current configuration of the main altar and side altars, in the arrangement of the seats of the nave and transept, in the configuration of the entrance windguard or in the access to the high choir are key parts of this proposal and they want to be corrected and adapted in order to respond to today’s requests.

At the same time, we are studying how to IMPROVE and enhance the characteristics of each space. In this category is integrated, for example, the possibility of intervention in the access to the galleries and their distribution, allowing the increase of the area of the organ tube space, allowing emergency exits from the galleries with the hypothesis of, if desired, creating space for the high choir, and in this way, phased and with an eye to the future, qualify aesthetically and functionally the upper floor of the church.

Finally, it is also intended to TRANSFORM, in a positive way, the functionality, the qualities so as to reinforce the image of the Mother Church. Starting from this key concept and the idea of conjugation between the existing and the need for a new area or new construction, it is proposed to transform the northern sacristy into a chapel destined for the Most Holy.

The proposal is based on work on a traditional programme; kitchen, living rooms, 3 bedrooms, toilets and seeks to ensure an internal spatial identity within the constraints defined for the site.

The height corresponding to the two floors allowed, is subdivided in order to create a complex interior, in which the layout by floors is replaced by the layout in levels, made possible by the succession and overlapping of platforms, generating various moments where looks and life intersect in a heterogeneous interior space, but at the same time agglutinating the various facets of daily life. In this way, an experience and a vertical path that differs, clarifies and crosses the different places of living is proposed. A mixture of perspectives is drawn, a varied offer of points of view is made possible, an interior implusion is stimulated in whose fragments the programme is built and the areas, which should nevertheless remain traditional. The living room is for living, the bedrooms for sleeping, the kitchen for eating, the stairs for separating and also uniting the different levels, transforming the whole journey into an emotional experience.

As a desire and as a symbol how many have in the idea of home the dream of representation and movement revealed by the already worn out images of the sublime staircases that Hollywood has so often built in the countless films of our lives? The project accepts this idea, this challenge and seeks to build only a movement, here unromantic and certainly more vertiginous, and not only focuses on the atrium, but revolves around a space programme that the houses of today still claim. In order to take advantage of the different heights and depths available, the house offers the street, not the façade that previously interrupted the block, but diversity as a sign. It is the roof that merges with the façade on a single, continuous surface, like a fragile membrane separating the public and private spheres.

Located in the Paredes de Coura municipality, the house stems from the desire to recover an existing ruin on the north of the site.

It is formed by two volumes that create a central square: one emerges from the pre-existing structure, following its form and materials; the other responds to the need to comply with the programme established by the client, extending longitudinally along the east boundary of the site, with a different language, setting itself apart from the ruin.

A clear expression of functionality, the house generates a diversity of spaces that relate to the existing structure without disturbing it. On one hand, there are occasional openings in the thick granite walls that evoke the existing structure and, on the other hand, the large windowpanes of the new building conquer the surrounding landscape and permit the building to be part of it.

The access to the house is through a central outdoor courtyard and through a markedly lower-height entrance hall, an articulation element that organizes the programme into the two buildings: in one, the kitchen and the living, adjusted to the uneven terrain; in the other, the bedrooms.

Granite and plaster are the materials of choice, coexisting peacefully in mutual respect of the new for the old.

We were thinking of an open space of contrasts, in a hybrid and perhaps contradictory process, where theatre, cinema, conferences, readings, exhibitions and installations could be some of the components of a more universal and heterogeneous cultural language which we would like to view as the concept for the project behind the work, in spite of… the politics, the crises, the good and the bad will or in other words the constraints that some projects, and this one in particular, go through.

So we said: “Already very constrained by a tight budget combined with an ever present idea of restoring and preserving some memory imposed by this auditorium, the solution required some inventiveness from the outset. The project soon sought to convey an idea of culture, meeting and experimentation, and consequently, tried to resolve a number of needs that ensured an improvement of spatial and technical conditions. This would encourage the accommodation and creation of various modes of expression, mirroring the range of values of communication and knowing that modern life has produced.” 

Today, everything seems to be closer to the initial idea. Porto built a Theatre. Its own. 

The whole of the building is hybridly broken, decontextualized between stagnant references and drawings from other times that have lost their justification and only remain as if forgotten. 

The intervention sought to correct certain urban anomalies, to unite rather than to separate, to realise the city giving it continuity. In this sense, we sought to create a widely public space: the square with various equipments, and with free space for the meeting of people and the two meshes (or parts of the city) that are to be rehabilitated. 

The FACE (Art and Culture Forum of Espinho) is a building that seeks to integrate a complexity of demands given the diversity of functions that the programme establishes. Part of a pre-existing building, once one of the most important Portuguese canning factories that we try to maintain and recover with an intervention close to the restoration and it is destined to a municipal museum that is the link for the different requested training spaces. 

The project respects the traditional typology, form and construction process. A building for several schools: one for higher education, a multimedia school, a school for animation cinema and, finally, an exhibition gallery and auditorium space that is intended to be shared and open to the community.