ARX

The Abrantes Municipal Market is located at the transition to the historic centre, on the site of the former Rodoviária do Tejo workshops, whose advanced state of ruin called for their complete demolition.

It is an urban plot set between two streets at different levels: below, to the west, the Largo do Tribunal, and above, to the east, Rua Nossa Senhora da Conceição. The plot is extraordinarily narrow for the programme in question, a condition that decisively shaped the design.

In programmatic terms, the importance of connecting these two streets was suggested, creating an ascending route towards the Iberian Museum of Archaeology and Art, which is planned for the Convent of São Domingos, set on the highest point of the city. In addition, a reading of the site revealed the importance of reflecting on the impact of this new building within the surrounding cluster of houses, heterogeneous in architectural quality and period of construction, but also of a considerably smaller scale when seen from the west.

From a typological point of view, a market is a building in which the idea of public space is taken to the extreme. At its limit, as still happens in many civilisations, the market takes place in the street itself, where traders sell their goods to passers-by from stalls and makeshift shelters, in a dissolution or complete overlap of the "market" space with urban space.

The new Abrantes Market is at once a building and a street. Through it, one passes from one street to the other, either directly via the staircase that opens at the northern end, or by wandering among the stalls and the spiral staircase at the southern end. Essentially, it is a street shaped and covered by a shell of exposed concrete painted white. At the top of the building, two volumes capture the sunlight, which flows down to the lower floors through openings in the slabs of the various levels, softly illuminating the spaces, highlighting the texture of the concrete and marking the passing rhythm of the days.