Horta City Seafront Requalification

Set on the island of Faial, in the Azores, the project comprises the first phase on the renewal of the public spaces along Horta's city seafront.

With the world’s 4th most visited marina, Horta is a mandatory stop for yachts traveling across the North Atlantic. Located in the central group of the Azores archipelago, the city is arranged as a large amphitheater facing Pico, the highest volcano in Portugal. Following a public competition aiming to renewal all the city´s seafront, the proposal’s main ambition is to achieve a requalified, attractive and cohesive urban seafront, which promotes new commercial, tourism, and leisure activities, to have a positive socioeconomic impact throughout the city. Developed under a huge financial crisis in Portugal, the project proposes very simple actions; the reprofiling of roads, so that cars, pedestrians, and bicycles have similar importance in a shared space, and the use of a single, continuous basalt pavement. Reinterpreting historical patterns, this material differentiates pedestrian and traffic areas, using gradients in different intensities.

The first built area is Largo do Infante, the city’s main public space, where families gather under old pohutukawa trees, and which had been changed countless times as the city developed. Being a historical area, the materials selected for the intervention have here a more refined quality. Instead of a basalt and limestone, black-and-white pattern, the white cobblestones are here is made with marble, giving the whole area a different light. When asked to build an Information Centre in the middle of the public space, we selected mirrored glass to create a phantom building. Simultaneously present and absent, it reflects the sea and city life around it in a kaleidoscopic way.