Architects: Miguel Saraiva & Associados
Location: Av. Catalunha, Vila Real de Santo António, Portugal
Client: Unifaro – União de Cooperativas de Habitação de Faro, UCRL
Engineers: Dimstruct
Project Area: 19,318 sqm
Project Year: 2006-2009
Photographs: FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
Monte Gordo is characterized by being a former fishing village located between the ocean and a vast pine forest.
The intervention predicted a complex of 12 controlled cost apartment buildings under a Housing Development Contract regime, set in a neighborhood with services (crèche), leisure areas (football grounds), shops and areas of collective use (church).
The programme established typologies of one, two and three bedrooms, distributed in 170 dwellings planned for multi-family housing on buildings with 4 floors.
Some lots has only one building, while the others accommodates several contiguous buildings and both share the same car park in the communal basement underneath.
The façades are the protagonists of this project, since the main façade and the rear façade are differentiated although they have a common element: the balcony. Each apartment can enjoy the outside areas as the main elevation has a balcony all along its length, communicating with the kitchens and living rooms.
The opposite elevation has vertical spans, adjusting to different sizes of balconies and alternately conferring a constant rhythm, disguising the more private areas.
Inside the apartments have a hall/corridor from which lead off the living room, kitchen, bedrooms and bathrooms.
A good articulation between areas is assured, avoiding intersections between private and social areas, which have larger spans hidden at the back of the balcony boxes, in this case for all the residents.
The small balconies of the rear elevation are exclusively for individual use, promoting a good spatial distinction that evokes greater privacy in the home.
Conceptually, the interior is extended to the exterior through the balcony areas, reproducing the meteorological culture of a place where it is always possible to enjoy the open air.
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- © FG+SG – Fernando Guerra, Sergio Guerra
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- site plan
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- floor plans
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- elevations 01
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- elevations 02
I look at this building and think cheese…anybody else?
I can’t say I find this terribly appealing… has some slight interest but overall just seems like another uncreative, impersonal apartment complex with a focus on the automobile and a lack of open space. Those constricting courtyards are the epitome of where I would not want to live.
I think it`s true that you say about the courtyards and about the cars… it seems a tipical project without any research or innovation, there is no reflection many reflections about solar orientation or climate working of the buildings…
so take a look to the last photograph, from google earth…a little portughese village near a nice wide beach…I ve been tripping to Portugal since I was 16, I live in Sevilla and always have admired the clean, cute, elegant way to solve their main problems…Monte Gordo is the first village after the frontier, it`s a poor village, full of unemployed fishermen…I think it`s very difficult to create better architecture with very few money, they always turn back to their greater Tavora, Siza, Carrilho…the masters who can draw the heaven in two or three lines, no tech, no eco, only light
I think this is a good project! go Portugal!
;)
well, I am thinking more in the lines of it being a controlled costs housing, so I guess they did the best they could with the money they had…