Costa Nova Social and Cultural Center / ARX Portugal

Curated by Matheus Pereira
CULTURAL CENTER • GAFANHA DA ENCARNAÇÃO, PORTUGAL
Architects : ARX PORTUGAL
Area : 1420 m²
Year : 2015
Photographs : Fernando Guerra | FG+SG
Architect In Charge : ARX Portugal
Design Team : Nuno Mateus e José Mateus c/ João Dantas, Ricardo Guerreiro, Sofia RAposo, Emanuel Rebelo, Fábio Cortês, Filipe Cardoso, Bruno Martins, Fábio Rosado, Sara Nieto, Héctor Bajo, Baptiste Fleury, Ana Fontes, Luís Marques, Joana Pedro
Technical Team : SAFRE, PEN, António Paiva Fernandes
City : Gafanha da Encarnação
Country : Portugal

Textual content description offered by the architects. The building is positioned on the Costa Nova dunes, between the seashore and the Avenue Nossa Senhora da Saúde resulting in it. The sand is minimize by a large web of picket walkways, which go over the dunes and permit pedestrian crossing from the city cluster to the seashore. To the east, the road is principally composed by small residence buildings, two or three tales excessive. At avenue stage there isn’t any precise sea view however one can sense its presence past the dune.

The brand new building, with its multifunction profile and symbolic and public presence, proposes to take its place as an finish piece for each the bordering buildings and the pure place. It’s meant to accommodate the brand new well being care heart, a social heart, and a present room for exhibitions and different public occasions. The intervention interprets an outset based mostly on 4 themes: the normal “palheiro” building approach, the pedagogy of building over dunes, the “landscape-building” as a part of a bodily and visible path to the ocean, and the agrarian land-holding structure as morphological matrix.

One of many most important conceptual assumptions behind the present venture is Costa Nova’s unique building typology. The venture needs to reinterpret, in a clearly up to date manner, Costa Nova’s attribute and ancestral methods of taking a look at a spot and building it. That is why the entire building, made completely of wooden, as the unique “palheiros”, seats on a semi-buried basis mesh in strengthened concrete, as to steady the building that can “hover” over the dune. This conceptual technique additionally goals to make the most of building on a decrease floor by making a handy and flowing connection to the rooftop the place one can get pleasure from a large ocean view. As a counterweight, and following pure topography, the general public walkway stretches into the guts of the building, creating a brand new picket public sq., as a forecourt, that leads the customer inside and protects from the wind.

Robinson Adey