Matadouro

Warehouse With Waveform And Texture

The Matadouro Industrial of Porto, surrounded by inherited industrial and residential uses resulting from successive transformations and urban amputations, nowadays regulates functional hesitations at low level and visual impasses at high level. Devalued with the implementation of internal city motor-way (VCI), the schism with the Dragão Stadium and the Metro is overcome through a crossing bridge with an impactful design morphology, that allows an extended overview on the former slaughterhouse and the Campanhã valley. The functional miscegenation of the bodies that made up the old Matadouro is unified by the head of access and the described crossing. The modelled and perforated roof adds the existing diversity and complexity with a shaded unit and conformity that covers the voids between volumes.

A common public identity is generated between sides of the city, through a social and cultural programmatic integration. Apparently wavy and textured by Antoni Gaudí, it is ascending or descending according to the topography and gives back the city its lost scale. Instrumentally transforming in the social and cultural universe, it constitutes a regenerative act of a socially decadent and economically needy territory. Aside from the main installed services, recreational and educational uses are proposed, in addition to museological features of evocation and allocation of the place. Both ambitious and audacious, this project seeks to transform the narrative on conservation and transformation in the city giving the area of Campanhã an opportunity to use this as a benchmark for future developments.