The area of intervention for this project was a city block located in Rato, bounded by the streets Alexandre Herculano, S. Filipe Neri and Rodrigo Fonseca; a block where the Rato’s market and Auto-Palace garage are located. It’s an urban area where the complex topography, the scale of empty spaces, the interconnections with the surrounding urban fabric and the relation between private and public proprieties constituted themes for reflection and research.

 

The programmatic content foresaw the design of dwellings, an office building, a cultural building and the redesign of the public spaces in between. Another important aspect that greatly structured the proposal was the required connection with the Rossio railway line that passes right underneath this city block, at 50m below ground level. With the necessity of avoiding unhealthy and claustrophobic spaces the proposal grew out of a subtraction exercise, trying whenever possible to provide the designed spaces with great openness and transparency.

 

Occupying the inner block in almost all of its extension the proposal consist of a buried volume with openings on each side and in the middle, made of several levels of mixed uses. A new, more spacious and open market would be located on the first floor, the second floor would be dedicated to varied retail services and the third and fourth floors would be dedicated to the train interface and connection with Rato’s metro station. On the northern most part of this volume I proposed a cultural space with the same number of floors.