Schede Competitions


- su -

Problems and conceptual approach of the project

The project proposes to overturn the present tendency towards the expansion of cities which are characterised by dispersed residential buildings.
It aims to create new procedures regarding the determination of the urban shape, attributing to residential unity the role of catalyst element. Infact, the idea of forming a project with a series of residential blocks in succession is refected.
Instead, on open type of composition with new developments is preferred that also links previous Portuguese experiences reflecting this tendency.
The main elements that drove our proposed were: the ordering of new installations vis-à-vis regulating axes and the creation of some fragments that can their give birth to space configurations.
Infact, the project originetes from axes in the new city and seeks a visual connection with the focal points of the historical parts of Evora. The axes are tracks that are metabolised to become tools based on the new proposal.
However, the new morphology agrees with Alvaro Siza who claims that "È necessàrio procurar formas de articular os diversos elementos. Porque a cidades hoje è um conjunto de fragmentos muito diversos".
We have proprosed to recompose spaces departing from a fragment. The axes of foundation like 'cardo' and 'decumano' also become aggregate elementos of the fragments giving birth to the heart of our project, a place where a court is created and becomes a moment of dialogue between public space (services) and private residential space.
The slab acquires, therefore, the value of a new collective, suspended square. The space of the slab cut between the fragments, on the one hand recalls the dimension of the ancient roads of Evora, and on the other hand enables one to see part of the city.
The horizontal development of the slab wants to stabilize a dialogue with the context, made of houses that rarely exceed three floors in height.
The residences that are erected on the slab propose flexible living systems in a way that satisfies different requirements.
We have decided to install a series of services for the community, some of these services have continuity with two of the fragments of the slab.
The slab almost becomes a borderline space between the public and the private but is also an element of transition between an urban scale and an architectonic scale. This borderline space then dissolves, multiplies and reconects in a series of footbridges and sidings. These connections break the intimacy of the home providing new space of relation.

Diversity of the housing typology

The lifestyle is no longer something pre-arranged, everything is continuosly and rapidly evolving.
Architectonic spaces have reached the zero point of housing, a simplification in the planimetric articulation and complexity of the space of the organism.
There is a rejection of control, to give finiteness to living spaces, in favour of undefined experiences and change, these possibility are left to those who inhabit this space.
Everything is fragmentation, potentiality and comunication, nothing can be permanent.
Today no one looks for new utopias, rather one speaks of innovation and of a society composed of a various identities. The typology has deprived its own role, infact it is not possible to create aprioristic schemes in the era of individualization for different lifestyles and continuos development.
The house must adept itself to meet the demands of the market which is increasingly orientated towards the individualism of the individual. A standard plan for a typical family, composed of two parents with one or two children, is becoming always less representative of the actual conditions: the singles's comunity is acquiring greater importance.
The "telework" will allow us to work at home, infact Alvin Toffler sees before the city, the house as the pivot on which all transformations will rotate. Ford and Taylor's model, that is based on the specialization of work, monofunctional lodgings has collapsed because the presuppositions that contributed to its formulation, are no longer valid.
Consequently our residences will have to change the housing unit are thought to be united in modulate forms. The interior space are thought because the residents can change the spaces in accordance with their needs. The residences are almost a kind of virgin land on which the residents like nomads of the contemporary era can live in freedom around the fire, in the heart of the home.
The house is made to measure for those live in it, this enables one to think every time about the elements and the space that make up the house, to measure of the different needs. The spaces which we speaks, with the exception of others for space like the bathrooms and the kitchen, are not assigned a particular place, but they are 'missing' in the house and they become responsible for its creation. These houses are anonymous, they are containers that filled in with those who live in them.

2003

Concorso EUROPAN 7 – Evora (Portogallo),

“The magnetism of fragment“

Arch. Orazio Trovato

con Arch. S. De Giuli, Arch. D. Quattrone, Arch. C. Vicari Aversa e altri