Moura, Portugal
2004
Moura's City Hall
The project ordered by Moura City Hall configures itself as a suggestion to perform a group of functional infrastructures, able to produce diferent possibilitys of tourist use in the delimited area marked out by the city’s oldest nucleus wall. The program asked, particularly, for a bar with a street café, a turist reception building and a water’s museological nucleus, considering the Moura’s oldest medicinal water spring existent in the castle.
Responding to the program, our proposal wanted to express a doubtless position about the way of intervene in places of high historical and patrimonial value emphasizing, from volumetric simplification and from the limited use of contemporary materials, a way of dialog and integration between the past and the present.
Trying to avoyd visual interferences in a soil which has already solidified an image of a great spatial opening through the plain landscape, the realization of new volumes is achieved in quotas below the ground level, using deformations and cavitys already existing and, presently, without character.
The white concrete, while architectonic surface of the new volumes, is the construction’s base material, characterized by a microperforation system with the double function of assuring enlightened and fresh spaces refering to the mural frames image of the hotest Southern areas.