maia co-housing and student residence

A plot with a ruin, North of Porto. A remnant of the rural past that has become a small-scale metropolitan suburb, is a convenient location by virtue of the recent subway line that from there reaches the airport and Porto’s center.

A nearby university, enrolling about 4000 students, adds some critical mass to the neighbourhood, allowing us to envision a housing project that goes beyond the conventional suburban “one plot, one house” model, that slowly but surely has defaced and blended in a way that defies the legibility of the limits between rural and urban.

We investigated two alternative scenarios proposing use and expansion of the existing farm building, in which old and new become a unit with a keen sense of the new housing realities, shaped by strong economic constraints, inaccessibility, and communal isolation arising in the main cities in the developed world. The proposed housing models will cater to an intergenerational public, such as students, elderly people, young couples, based on a principle of shared spaces, services and utilities: the co-housing.

Around forty years of relative prosperity conceived a new model in which the old paradigm of three generations co-habiting under one roof became unusual. The gain of privacy was counterbalanced by a definitive loss of the convenience of mutual-help, socialization, expense sharing and sustainability. The co-housing model brings back the convenient aspects of the old sharing paradigm and family living experience, unbounded by nuclear family ties.

We investigated a model that potentiates social interaction and mutual help synergies, without compromising the privacy of the domestic realm. Sometimes, it is about the family you choose: a community.

Both proposals relate to the preexisting built conditions, creating a “U” shaped ensemble that defines a shell towards the main street, while embracing in a single, generous and communal gesture to the western farmland, whose agricultural history and potential will be reactivated as a park and vegetable garden for the new tenants. Inside, a variety of housing typologies allow for flexible use that will cater to the specific needs of a heterogeneous group of people. The central courtyard becomes the fulcrum of collective life, and distribution areas are planned in such a manner that will facilitate their collective appropriation by the future tenants.