Given the state of utter disrepair and alteration of the building and the mass, the basis for its reconstruction lies in the design for planning permission submitted to Porto City Council in October 1934 by Engineer Jorge Manuel Viana. The house was originally characterised by features of modernist and art deco inspiration, typical of some of the bourgeois architecture of the first third of the 20th century in Porto. It displays a language and urban logic that is recognisable in this and other projects by the same architect, in this area of the city that has been since dubbed as the “Hollywood Quarter”. The urban logic of the lots which borrow from the “garden city” principles with luxurious wooded and landscaped plots, outhouses and swimming pools in their gardens, allows for houses of a marked geometrical composition, features, lines and forms that stood out at the time for their boldness and modernity. The lack of detailed information on the original turned the reconstruction into an exercise of comparison, intuition and conjecture, which made the work into a formal synthesis of this beautiful 1930s townhouse.
project:
restoration of a house
in guerra junqueiro
location:
guerra junqueiro street,
porto, portugal
date:
2001-2003
building area:
210 m2
architecture:
nuno brandão costa
electrical engineer:
raul serafim (rs associados)
mechanical engineer:
raul bessa (get)
photographs:
arménio teixeira