ARX

The Porto Regional Blood Centre is a building whose main function is to support the collection and analysis of blood and its separation into three components, which are subsequently distributed to hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. This typology, highly complex given the constant risk of blood contamination, is recent and little tested. Ongoing scientific and technological advances demand constant adaptation. It is therefore a building with an unstable interior, one that will undergo frequent metamorphoses throughout its life.

The programme is a sequential process (the breaking down of blood), which makes a low-rise, linear construction more appropriate than a vertical one, as the adjacent residential buildings (5–6 storeys) might suggest. The Centre sits on a plot detached from the former Quinta do Covelo. It is an irregular polygon wedged into the core of an urban block, connecting with the city through two separate streets. The line-building runs along the various directions of the strange polygon, seeking out its geometry. In its apparent movement, it settles into segments of variable "state": thick and grounded, thin and floating, or flush with the ground. Its ends touch the streets delicately: on Rua do Bolama the building levitates, clearly establishing the permeability of the main (public) entrance and peering over the wall of the Parque do Covelo across the street; at the opposite end (Rua Visconde de Setúbal) it takes the form of a (service) portico, restoring the old wall of the quinta. Along its length, the building oscillates between a dominant systematisation of a technological nature and occasional subjective gestures arising from spontaneous responses to the site. In construction terms, the building is layered in a variety of raw materials: the local granite with which it meets the ground, the galvanised steel of its skin, the industrial glass of the windows, the zinc of the roofs and the plywood of the soffit linings.

There is no fixed relationship between container and content: on the exterior, the vertical misalignment of the window modules reveals that no alignment is sought in response to a predetermined layout of rooms. The interior, with its continuous materiality, rests on the premise that spaces can be built and rebuilt over time. Natural light is filtered and constant (for laboratory work), ensured by bands of Murolux glass that capture, soften and diffuse the morning and evening sun. Within the block, visual contact with the degraded surroundings is cropped by long, narrow windows, turning the chaotic setting into abstract strips of decontextualised views. The inert garden (granite setts, granite gravel and asphalt) is detached along its perimeter from its surroundings, creating a zone of romantic abandonment for invasive climbing plants. Against the grey background, all the introduced flora (trees, hedges and climbers) will turn purple in autumn, in a momentary consanguinity with the building's programmatic universe.