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Vila Nova de Gaia - Portugal 

Architects: OODA   
Design Team: Francisco Lencastre, João Jesus, Julião Pinto Leite, Diogo Brito, Rodrigo Vilas-Boas, Inês Monteiro, Mariana Duarte Santos, Vânia Costa, Joana Ferreira, Micol Pucciarelli, and André Lima (OODA)
Engineering: A400 – Projetistas e Consultores de Engenharia
Landscape: Neoturf.
Visualizations: Fusão
Client: EFIPRO

‘Jardins da Arrábida’ is surrounded by a diversity of seemingly unplanned uses such as hotels, residences, hospitals, and shopping centres, close to a motorway and the Arrábida Bridge crossing the Douro River.

Careful about the orientation, lighting and natural ventilation, the project completes the housing voids with a regular and modular strategy, giving special attention to the spatial and environmental qualification of the public space and to the central and perimeter rationalization of the accessibility.

Typologies are designed for larger or smaller households and for longer or shorter-term dwellers. The structural unit is home to formal diversity that provides the organizational and distributive variation of the apartments.

A formal modulating and disciplining vocabulary regulates all the intervention. Relationships of neighbourhood, important for contemporary times, are created and shared by the added and inherited volumes. Structural frames accommodate versatile and changeable housing units with materials that express flexibility and durability.