ARX

The building is located at the transition between Largo de Santos and Largo Vitorino Damásio, on Lisbon’s riverfront, on a site with two distinct fronts.

The southern volume sits on the Boavista embankment, in the city’s flat area. To the north, it meets Calçada Marquês de Abrantes, a sloping hillside street laid out according to Eugénio dos Santos’ plan for the reconstruction of Lisbon following the 1755 earthquake.

The building therefore has a flat southern frontage, characterised by a fluid design and modernist influence, and a steeply sloping northern rear, rooted in the Pombaline tradition and defined by a more ordered character.

The building addresses a particular urban condition: the transition from a conventional block composed of two buildings with an internal courtyard to a single building with two fronts. The plot is consequently tense and triangular in form, converging towards one end, and is cut on its eastern side by a small pre-Pombaline building that is to be preserved.

Located within an exceptionally long urban block (450 m), which forms the southern edge of the Madragoa neighbourhood, the project proposes a covered public passageway, providing the historic neighbourhood with a new direct connection to the lower level of the city. It is a street-stair, like so many others that characterise historic Lisbon.

The building presents itself as an accompanying piece, essentially urban, neutral in character and without a will of its own. It follows and gives form to what the context dictates, maintaining formal and material continuity with its surroundings. Its contemporaneity is revealed in the interior or read between the lines of its detailing.