Within one of Porto’s most intensely contested centralities, a residual void persists, caught between infrastructural retreat and speculative projection. Once defined by the surface terminus of the Póvoa railway line, the area has undergone successive ruptures: the burial of new metro lines beneath the site disrupted former alignments and displaced informal uses, including a lawn appropriated for recreation by local residents. That field of collective life was eventually overwritten by a construction yard, emblematic of a shift in priorities – from community-oriented potential to subterranean infrastructure and commercial intent.
This project reinterprets the void not as absence, but as a layered and contested urban field. Situated between the monumental presence of OMA’s Casa da Música, the sober metro and bus interface by Souto de Moura, and a surrounding fabric of mid-rise housing, the intervention navigates a dense landscape of spatial interruptions and latent continuities. Rather than proposing a singular form, the design introduces a framework of civic, collective, and private programs – spaces of encounter, support, and representation – that seed a renewed neighborhood life grounded in spatial specificity, while allowing for privately managed areas within the urban fabric.
The proposal approaches the void as both passage and cut: a fracture in plan and section, but also a site where new forms of connection can be composed. In doing so, it engages with the obsolescence of infrastructural forms not as a residue to be erased, but as a condition to be transformed. Architecture, here, becomes an instrument to read and recompose the progression of urban form: one that does not smooth over difference, but renders it a medium for new continuity.
Bibliography
- Allen, S. (1999). Points + lines: Diagrams and projects for the city. Princeton Architectural Press.
- Shane, D. G. (2011). Urban design since 1945: A global perspective. Wiley.
- Koolhaas, R., & Mau, B. (1995). S, M, L, XL. Monacelli Press.
