«A Nacional» Building

Located in the civic centre of Porto, this corner building marked the beginning of Avenida dos Aliados circa 1919/1925. The programmatic updating from offices into domestic use is achieved through the readjustment of the interior subdivision. Respecting the logic of a repetitive plan, vertical alignments are proposed where all the necessary infrastructures are surgically concentrated. In the current refurbishment of the building, the 1966s additions were demolished, with the central skylight being redesigned, reestablishing the spatial, luminous, and ‘urban’ atmosphere originally conceived in Marques da Silva's project.

The ‘Nacional’ building underwent several changes that distorted the quality of the original 1919 solution. Given the pre-existence value, the current project focuses on the surgical design of infrastructures - which is fixed in change – introducing possible flexibility and programmatic reversibility in time. An update of usage for infrastructure, a contemporary retaking of the original design. In an ergonomic exercise, autonomous modules were designed, organized on two levels, concentrating the kitchenette, toilets, staircase, bed (on an open mezzanine) and cabinets. These modules/cabinets use curved lines to sublimate spatial fluidity in a metaphorical approach to the language of the epoch. In transforming the typology into housing, special attention was paid to the decorum and protection of the spaces between the interior of the domestic hub and the collective spatiality of the atrium. The distribution is done through the existing stair and walkways and on the sixth floor, the redesign of the new skylight incorporates a circular walkway.

The current project encouraged the use of traditional materials and techniques, combined with the application of new materials, in continuity with the pre-existing ones. We searched for a balance between: intervening in the existing fabric, within the limits of the active legislation and the contemporary ways of comfort for a new usage. The parti – accommodates through focused rehabilitation of Marques da Silva initial materiality – reconciles apparent opposites - truth and artifice; durability/reversibility; tradition/ innovation; warm decorative elements in counterpoint to plain new elements. There is implied in the work a certain wish for the invisibility of the new deed, allowing for the eventual but unforeseeable revertability of functions - an unwritten norm in today’s quests regarding patrimony intervention. With regards to comfort, we look back to the old European tradition of inertia – we believe - being the motto for our future endeavor to re-equilibrate the planet`s athmosphere.