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Porto - Portugal

Architects: OODA   
Design Team: Francisco Lencastre, Diogo Brito, Rodrigo Vilas-Boas (OODA)
Engineering: Ccad- Serviços De Engenharia, GATENGEL - Projectos de Engenharia, Noraqua - Consultores de Engenharia, Paulo Queirós de Faria
Client: Autentiburgo – Investimentos Imobiliários, Lda
Photographer: João Morgado

Inserted in the Cardosas Block, the recent intervention by the Urban Rehabilitation Society has, among other strategic and urban actions, created a square inside the block.
The two plots are located on Largo dos Lóios, testimony to the old door of Santo Elói in the medieval Fernandina Wall of Porto. Preserving the inherited envelope and backbone, freeing the plans on the two lighted and ventilated fronts, the intervention interprets the idea of the construction industry transversal to the bourgeois building systems and subsystems and the current structures and substructures.

Aimed at commercial spaces on the ground floor, namely restaurants, and temporary tourism housing, multi-purpose boxes (‘magic cubes’) are installed in the uses and infrastructures of the apartments, intertwining kitchens, wardrobes, and toilets. Versatility and mutability are evident marks and present in the occupant volumes that, perforated, are contaminated by the equally modular tiles, with evocations of history and collective memory.