Habitar Portugal 12-14HP 12-14

The Terraços de Bragança housing, services and shopping  complex will occupy a lot of some 5,000m2 in area, situated between the streets António Maria Cardoso and Alecrim, which appears as a hiatus to be filled in a perfectly consolidated zone.

There has been the preoccupation to create a dialogue with the surrounds, and from it find the prime defining reasons for the project; as well as making an attentive reading of the terrain, its topography and the marks left by those who have lived in it and given it sense.

These marks revert to at least the beginning of the 14th c., when the Fernandine Defensive Wall was completed.

The construction of this defensive structure clearly defined the limit of the city.

The demolitions undertaken on the land some 20 years ago revealed a length of the Wall, clearly visible today.

This set of foundations divides the terrain roughly in half, in the longitudinal direction, in parallel with the roads that were meanwhile opened.

This topological, geographic and historical cleavage dividing the terrain into two, and linking the parts to their preferred access roads, is assumed by the project, both in morphological terms and in programmatic terms.