Submission: July 15, 2014
Registration: June 28, 2014
Language: English or Portuguese
Location: Porto, Portugal
Prizes: 1st Prize € 1.500 + Publication 2nd Prize Publication
Type: Open competition for architecture students and young architects under 35 years old.
International architecture competition “The Unknown Porto” organized by the U8 magazine editorial board, and its secretariat. The proposed exercise asks a redesign of a site in Castelo da Maia, both urbanistic and architectonically. The guidelines for this intervention are presented on the “gerenal coordinates” of the competition.
We want to give notice of the real portuguese territory, the territory forgotten on the news reality, which is, maybe, ashamed with those urban landscapes that contaminate the country “purities”. The road is itself a contamination happening. Its reality increases the need to think about the space-time factor in the architects gaze to the place or set of places, Also, the road demands from the architect a very tangible response in the realm of scale, proportion and form.
The service station is the most privileged stopping point along the road places. Because of that, more and more it gathers a lot of services, added to the conventional store, like bar, restaurant, jet wash, etc. To boost this quality of centralize people and goods, we would like to add a commercial area for artists (with their ateliers) and a retail plant nursery. We believe in the potential of the informality of these urban spaces to generate new cultural phenomenon.
