Alcácer do Sal Residences / Aires Mateus

Architects: Aires Mateus
Location: Alcacer do Sal, Portugal
Architect In Charge: Francisco Aires Mateus & Manuel Aires Mateus
Design Team: Giacomo Brenna, Paola Marini, Anna Bacchetta, Miguel Pereira
Area: 1,560 sqm
Year: 2010
Photographs: FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra

Contractor: Ramos Catarino, Sa
Engineering: Engitarget, lda
Landscape Architects: ABAP Luis Alçada Batista
Client: Santa Casa da Misericordia de Alcácer do Sal

The project is based on a attentive reading of the life of a very specific kind of community, a sort of a micro-society with its own rules.

It is a program, somewhere in between a hotel and a hospital, that seeks to comprehend and reinterpret the combination social/private, answering to the needs of a social life, and at the same time of solitude. Independents unities aggregate into a unique body, whose design is expressive and clear.

The reduct mobility of those who will live in the building suggests that any displacement should be an emotive and variable experience. The distance between the independent units is measured and drawn to turn the idea of path into life, and its time into form.

The building, designed path, is a wall that naturally rises from the topography: it limits and defines the open space, organizing the entire plot.