Refurbishment project of a housing on Anselmo Braancamp street
The building, which features a grocery store on the ground floor and a house on the first floor, was built in 1910 and was inaugurated alongside the street itself.
Over the last decade, the building's roof has undergone some deterioration, especially because it's been empty for several years. Repair work was needed to protect the ground floor's stores. This resulted in the complete demolition of the housing's interior.
Amongst the project's requests was the need to increase the overall area. This led to the creation of two new rooms, one on the ground floor to serve as a garage, and another on the first floor, for housing. These two spaces diverge from the existing building expression, having a greater simplicity of forms, a window with different dimensions, not to mention the expression of the new covering, the flat roof and the design of the handrail itself.
The noticeable style difference between the new intervention and the already existing building can be seen as a project necessity. However, this diversion intends to bring together different components, both old and new, by overlapping prior elements with the more recent ones. To go alongside this idea, a new window was opened on an existing wall and the span of a different window was modified.
On the inside, which was completely unobstructed, the project was designed taking into consideration the relations between the rooms and the existing spaces, while maximizing natural light on the main areas. The proposed rooms are spread across a corridor that goes through the entire house, which connects both entrances: the front and back doors, accessible from the street and the backyard, respectively.
Inside, a large element of formal composition has been created, completely covered with birch wood, composed of shelves and cabinets that serve the corridors and the rooms and that finishes the different alignments of the facades; is a structuring element of the entire housing space, which extends from the arrival area through the stairs to the living room, lining and framing the entrances to the utility room and to the kitchen.
In the interior space a wardrobe made out of birch was created, which winds up differents alignments of the facades. It's an element of reference throughout the house, and extends from the entrance to the main room.
Urban rehabilitation has been recovering over the last years, bringing back to life a large part of the patrimony that had been degraded and in ruins since the 1980s, when Portugal was privileged enough to afford new buildings.
On a territory composed of many "anonymous" buildings which individually hold little architectural value, maintenance and preservation of the existing urban complexes is very important. Together, these buildings maintain the character of the cities, contributing to their dynamization and defining their identity. Through this project, we sought to defend this noble purpose.
architect: Paulo Seco – Impare Arquitectura
colaboration: Filipe Lourenço
engineering: José Luis Marques
image: © ITS Ivo Tavares Studio
