C6 – Portals

2014 – …

Building façades have a scale that is beyond us, relating themselves with the street and the city, portals are the part of the façade design to our measure, the scale of Man.

These portals are in Bairro de Alvalade, an urban project that combines the models of traditional city with the modernist one, building from this apparent impossibility, its character. Behind streets with continuous façades, shop windows and portals that punctuate these buildings, we can find apartments with modernist plans.

Portals mean transition, they mark the buildings beginning, the entrance more than the exit, thereof its asymmetry, so much characterized on the outdoor, and so little on the indoor. Just as in science fiction, the portals are also passages to another dimension. In Alvalade case, entering these portals represents also a way to pass from one era to another.