aliança house / atelier (Oitoo)

The House / Atelier is a residential / workplace project commissioned by a pair of Designers that elected Porto as the place to raise their family.
oitoo found an extremely promising plot with a generous backyard and the rather odd remnants of a building renovation gone awry.

It seems likely that, as was the case here, architects can soon expect to be called upon to renovate the “refurbishments” that have taken place in historical centres in the last ten years. Here, a preexisting nineteenth-century building underwent a previous expansion to build touristic apartments. The work was never completed, and the half-built structure was left standing out like a sore thumb in a limbo of incompleteness for five years.

Nevertheless, the existing plot holds bare potential qualities for a new project and a new use. There is the sheer volume and surface available; the opportunity to have a generous garden in the backyard; and the rather uncommon circumstance of having three façades in an otherwise continuous street front… There is also the fact that part of the new structure is already built and requires a critical assessment of its validity under the premises of the new project in order to keep as much as possible of what is already there.

The new brief requires seamless integration of domestic life-work dynamics under one common roof, creating specific yet complementary and independent spaces, allowing simultaneous use as a generous home and an inspiring atelier.
Our project looks to bring a sense of unity and coherence to the revised structure, envisaging a building that will be respectful of its neighbours while maintaining its own specificity: an urban response to a long-standing problem.

Judicious demolitions will remove part of the recently juxtaposed, excessive, volume. The preexisting stone walls are kept, as is most of the newly added concrete structure. The challenge is to incorporate all these disparate elements into what will hopefully read as a coherent building.
Ground floor areas, of greater public engagement, are reserved for work and atelier spaces. One generous living area on the first floor overlooks the garden, acting as a hinge between working areas, below, and bedrooms above.
The project answers the outstanding sustainability requirements of the brief by displaying a strong commitment to reuse of pre-existing elements, taking the greatest advantage of façade and volume to generate natural cross ventilation. It incorporates sustainably sourced materials for insulation and flooring, privileging a straightforward detailing strategy that declines to clad surfaces that can be exposed without losing aesthetic appeal and by installing all feasible systems of collecting and using available energy and hydric resources.