ARX

The site of the Costa Nova Socio-Cultural Centre is located on the seafront of Costa Nova, in Ílhavo, on the dunes that border the beach and Avenida da Nossa Senhora da Saúde, which provides access to it. The east side of this street is entirely built up with buildings intended mostly for housing, between two and three storeys high.

At the level of the Avenida, the sea cannot be seen. Its presence beyond the dune, however, can be sensed. There is also an extensive network of raised timber boardwalks that run across the dunes and connect the town to the beach.

In this context, the new building sets out to establish itself as a closing piece, with its public multifunctionality and symbolic presence. It is to accommodate the new health centre, a social centre, and a performance and exhibition hall. The intervention is intended to be characterised by an approach grounded in four fundamental themes:

The building tradition of the palheiros; The lessons of building on the dunes; The landscape-building, a route offering visual access to the sea; The rural land-division pattern as a morphological matrix

The original building and urban typology of Costa Nova is one of the project's main conceptual premises, which seeks to reinterpret, through a clearly contemporary approach of a public and symbolic nature, the ancestral and characteristic way of looking at the place and of building in Costa Nova.

To this end, it is proposed that the entire construction be built in timber, resting on a semi-buried network of reinforced concrete foundations, so as to stabilise the building, which will float above the dune like the original palheiros.

At its origin, the building will adopt an attitude relatively close to interventions known as "land art" (landscape-building), embracing its public nature as a symbolic and referential image. This conceptual strategy also seeks to take advantage of the building's placement in a hollow, seeking, by contrast, to create a fluid connection to the roof, from which there will be a wide view over the sea on climbing to its westernmost end. The walkway also extends through the heart of the building, opening up a public timber square, like a church forecourt, that leads visitors inside.

The topographical character of the building and the fact that the entire roof can be walked on help reinforce its public character, as its relationship with the terrain and the sea will offer a new experience to the residents and visitors of Costa Nova, given that today the visual relationship with the water from the town's public spaces is essentially with the lagoon rather than the sea.

The area surrounding the Ria de Aveiro and Ílhavo has a very particular land-division pattern, with long, narrow plots resulting from the need for access via service roads and from generations of inheritance divisions. This characteristic gives the locality a very particular character, with a visible impact on the built heritage that has come to distinguish this region.

The building seeks to respond to this characteristic by being divided into three distinct longitudinal volumes oriented towards the town, each with a different roof finish. Besides delimiting the different pedestrian access areas, this arrangement allows Costa Nova's land-division pattern to extend into the building, reinforcing its connection to the pre-existing territory.

The building now proposed aims to contribute to a reflection on the evolution of Costa Nova and on the character of human constructions in this context over time. Place, Man and Time.

Being a contemporary building on the one hand, and a large-scale public building on the other, it is clear that the morphological typology of the ancestral palheiro does not seem appropriate. But traditional materials and building techniques can certainly give shape to new uses and new times.

A general timber construction strategy was therefore adopted, based on a three-dimensional structure of glued laminated timber columns and beams, with a monochromatic exterior timber cladding, nailed horizontally and protected with natural oils, as in the original palheiros. The entire interior will likewise be built in timber, in logical coherence with the overall construction system, adopting a timeless tectonic that evokes the memory of a familiar and distant way of making.

The intention is for the entire structure and cladding to remain exposed, as in the original timber boats and palheiros, so that, as was once the case, the building has a strong plastic and constructive identity, rather than a "decorative" one, arising directly from the way it is made.

The building, which from the outside will appear as something between a form of "land art" and the construction of an upturned ship, will present a strong dichotomy between a rougher, monolithic exterior and a delicate, light (white) interior.

The transitions between interior and exterior, both in the façades and in the canopies shading the glazed façades, will be the moments of greatest tension between architecture and structure, as it is in these areas that the building departs most from an essentially repetitive structural and constructive logic.

We also intend for most of the roof of this building to be accessible, so that the café and the auditorium ramp become essential points of passage and pause on any visit to Costa Nova, allowing visual contact with the sea. The roof will be paved in timber and will also include some areas of coarse sand, so that the beach and the dune merge with the building, in pursuit of a natural construction.

Algumas notas: mantive palheiros em itálico, por ser um termo sem tradução direta (as casas tradicionais de madeira sobre estacas da Costa Nova). "Estrutura fundiária" ficou como land-division pattern, que descreve com clareza a divisão em lotes estreitos e compridos. "Ria" traduzi por lagoon no corpo do texto, mantendo Ria de Aveiro como nome próprio. E "adro" ficou como church forecourt, para preservar a referência; se preferir algo mais neutro, forecourt basta.