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Architects: Rosmaninho+Azevedo Arquitectos
- Area: 1200 m²
- Year: 2018
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Photographs:Luis Ferreira Alves
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Manufacturers: Investwood, CIN, Gyptec, VMZINC
Text description provided by the architects. The Vale do Tua Interpretive Center of (CIVT) is placed in two unoccupied old railway warehouses. Situated in opposite sides of the Douro line, the proposed program was for each of them explored the complementarity and the character of each building.
To intervene in the impressive landscape of Douro is a huge challenge and a great privilege. With this responsibility, we developed the project with the idea of memory and transformation always present, trying to make the reading of the values of the place point to clues for change.
The railway context was a factor of organization of the existing constructions, introducing a longitudinal reading of the whole set (besides all the security constraints).
The intervention in the wooden south building, implied the creation of new external platforms of access and a more assumed design in the treatment of the public space and the connection with the street. This building was recovered from board to board, is now transformed into the large reception space with a complementary program of sanitary facilities and storage installed in a volume/container that does not touch the existing one, allowing the reading of the original space and the appreciation of its structure .
In the north building, we explore a more direct relationship with the station building that is reflected immediately in the metallic access bridge - which crosses a small existing garden, and a more contemporary approach in the treatment of pre-existence (meanwhile rebuilt after a fire in 2009).
In the interior we developed on the ground floor the space for a long-term exhibition. In the upper floor, the spaces for the educational service and the remaining workspaces were organized on a mezzanine.
In summary, we tried to standardize the two construction times with the continuous skin in corrugated zinc on one side and the wood batten on the other, reinterpreting constructive systems and textures.
