The light box
Manuel Montenegro

Nicolau Nasoni, a Florentine painter-architect, dominated the mid-18th century cultural scene of Porto through his many interventions in the city and its surroundings. Among the palaces, churches, gardens, and villas, the largest of them all, in terms of the area to be transformed, was the restoration of the Quinta da Prelada, a walled estate with a surface area equivalent to that of the walled city itself. There, Nasoni designed gates, obelisks, fountains, gardens, a maze and the longest baroque axis in the Iberian peninsula, now severed by the city’s inner highway and with its first half now transformed into city streets. Half-way through this axis (where the growing city met with what was left of the estate), sat the abandoned half-built ambitious renovation of an earlier house.

Two and a half centuries later, the Santa Casa da Misericórdia do Porto, a five-century-old charity, tightly quartered in the city centre, and inheritor of the estate, decided to properly house and give public access to its archives by renovating the house and its immediate surroundings. António Leitão Barbosa, the architect commissioned with the difficult task of creating a new image for an old and mutilated building, inside an older, mutilated estate, now owned by an even older, respectable institution, carefully steered his team in interpreting the long history of the site and the specificities of the programme. The strategy was to carefully renovate what had withstood the test of time, accepting the difficult complex the house had become
after its many owners and uses. To mark its new function, and the definitive transition from private to public space, a new volume is posed in striking contrast with all the pre-existing elements. The materiality of the new volume addresses the centuries-long tradition of additions to the fabric of Porto, using the newest light material at hand – wood, slate, corrugated metal and now, glass – to expand the limits of the pre-existing space, creating an oversized lantern (another typical feature of the fabric of Porto) that shines from within the ruins to shed light on the several
histories that cross paths at this site: that of an institution that runs a programme, that of a building that provides a context and that of a specialised window-making company, which always lends a hand when designers need solutions for their ideas to shine.

Lycée Français International de Porto
Pedro Castro Cruz

In the grounds of the Serralves estate there is a sense of descent. Both the House and the Museum (1)1. Casa de Serralves, a modern work by Marques da Silva and Serralves Museum, a contemporary work by Siza Vieira. are located at the upper level of Avenida Marechal Gomes da Costa and the gardens, the lake, the woods and the agricultural areas spread out across the land that heads downwards to the east.

The Lycée Français, which occupies the land adjacent to Serralves, provides a similar experience, starting and ending with two buildings by Nuno Valentim and Frederico Eça – from the Reception Pavilion at the entrance’s high level, to the New Primary School, which sinks down at the extreme eastern end of the property.

Jofebar was involved in both. In the small 2010 pavilion, there are some thirty square metres of window frames, but the latest intervention, in 2012, to which this file relates, now includes 530m² of glazed surfaces.

Between the two works there are earlier architectural structures which make them interventions in the built heritage: the 1963 building, that lies between the main body near the street and the classroom blocks that follow the slope of the land, all connected by an external gallery, and the expansion of 1995, which established a discreet new entrance from the street but created a new volume that has considerable impact on the playground. (2)2. The first building, from 1963, is by Manuel Marques de Aguiar,  Carlos Carvalho Dias and Luiz Cunha; the 1995 extension is by Jean Pierre Porcher, Margarida Oliveira and Albino Freitas (ToposAtelier)

The two works of Nuno Valentim and Frederico Eça show perfectly the spatial wealth and the control of scale, both in the small and the large interventions.

In the small triangular pavilion, each facing concrete elevation displays an asymmetrical square window, generating a centripetal movement when the volume is penetrated by one of them, discovering a gap that bridges the slope on which the building is balanced.

In the large school, the complexity is no less interesting; but let us see. The ease with which the original building clings to the sloping land comes not only from the geometry of the siting and the use of materials, but also from the sloping roof that reinforces the direction of the topography. The sloping roof, close to the heart of the regionalists of the 1960s in their reinterpretation of modernity, is the formal element that stands out in Nuno Valentim and Frederico Eça’s new building. The presence of the construction is almost reduced to the slope that rises from the ground and is finally discovered as a (partly) useable roof because it is converted into an athletics track. On arrival, this impression of a raised floor is underlined by the glazed facade which emphasises the slash and restores, as a reflection, the modern construction and the nature that lies beyond the Serralves walls.

The intervention is bigger than it looks, having managed to double (3)3. The built area of the New Primary School is approximately 4000m2. the built area to date, through the strategy of sinking the mass. The entrance is via a grand ramped staircase that dives into the ground and leads to the discovery of links to the lower level, namely the sunken courtyard within high concrete walls which extends a multipurpose room, defined by two glass walls with large sliding panels, reconciling the interior and the exterior by means of “space density”.

The anchoring stress to the ground is graciously lost to the east when the roof is seen no longer as a plane but as a high suspended slab front, snaking its way in a retracting and expanding play from the existing stone wall, which separates it from the Serralves woods, and setting back another glass façade. This façade is continuous from the refectory to the classrooms and is filled with mystery between the set back shade and the reflections of an almost ‘Romantic route’.

From the construction point of view, the work is compatible with the formal simplicity, with reinforced concrete walls for earth retention and for great spans which provide the stability required for the large sliding windows. The sliding window frames are in aluminium with slender profiles and the fixed and opening frames are in steel. The techniques are simple and therefore the constructive sophistication comes from rigorous detail rather than technological solutions.

The recreational areas are populated by precast concrete circles, rings that are presented as benches and tree pits, blocks that become meeting points or evoke giant games of pataca. (4)4. Pataca or Malha – traditional Portuguese targeting game This imagery conjures up the playgrounds of van Eyck (5)5. Playgrounds designed by Aldo van Eyck (The Netherlands, 1918-99) in Amsterdam between 1947 and 1978. as one realises that, more than these recreational elements, it is the spatial experience throughout the building that is designed for the Child. The school has a ludic character that one believes to be fundamental to the idea of teaching, leading the children into games of discovery, opposing movements, such us up and down, views from above and below, huddling together and scattering, ins and outs, windows and mirrors.

Beyond the limit or the Art of inhabiting the space “between”
Susana Lobo (Department of Architecture, University of Coimbra)

Invoking Walter Benjamin, in “A Topology of Thresholds”, Georges Teyssot states that “the threshold (die Schwelle) must be radically distinguished from the limit or border (die Grenze).”¹ The limit is a line. It has no “thickness”. It separates and defines an “inside” and an “outside”. The threshold, on the other hand, is an area. A “passage”. It is “in between”. It consists of space and time. The same idea is behind the “in-between realm” of Aldo van Eyck. “A home for twin phenomena and hence also […] a home for a reality which is thereby interiorized and rendered transparent”.² The Casa del Infinito (House of the Infinite) in Cádiz is centripetal and centrifugal. At once. It breathes. “Both in and out”.³

In one of the many residential holiday resorts which abound on the Iberian coast, the project by Alberto Campo Baeza explores the exceptional situation of the beachfront plot. Between the road and the sea, civilisation and nature, the house is designed as a podium from which the gaze extends as far as the horizon. This platform facing the Atlantic defines an outside-inside, contained by the body-wall-screen marking the formal entrance into the inhabited area, sheltering it from “others” and the wind. The property brings together quintessential holiday amenities in the form of a swimming pool, amphitheatre and barbecue. The house’s more conventional plan extends “downward” over two floors in a kind of Roman cryptoportico which stabilises and accompanies the declivity of the terrain. Access is gained via a stairway which descends into the travertine outer skin, leading us “inside” the building. A moment of transition, announcing an “interior”. This interior welcomes us – before presenting us once again with the sea view, exposing itself. An inside-outside in which the landscape is the house and the house itself becomes the landscape. This connection is reinforced by the minimalist expression of the frames surrounding the great recessed windows. The window, in its classical sense, disappears. There is no perceptible boundary between the “inside” and the “outside” – just a series of voids hewn into the rocky mass.

An essay on the topic of dwelling, the Casa del Infinito is a place in which opposites are reconciled: culture-nature, man-environment, inside-outside. An ambivalence upon which the concept of holidays also rests. And perhaps that is the true essence of the holiday home: the art of inhabiting the space “between”.

1. Teyssot, G. (2005). A Topology of Thresholds. Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space, Vol. 2(1), pp. 89-116)

2. Eyck, A. van (2008). Writings (Vol. 1). The Child, the City and the Artist. Amsterdam: SUN, p. 124. (written in 1962)

3. Eyck, A. van (2008). Writings (Vol. 2). Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947-1998. Amsterdam: SUN, p. 200. (originally published as Eyck, A. van (1959). Verhaal van een Andere Gedachte (The Story of Another Idea). Forum, 7)

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