Retirement Home - Reviving Alfama

  1. Heritage, Residential, Urbanism
Academic Project / Lisbon: Alfama District / ETSAM, 2012



Floor plan of one of the buildings intervened: distribution of different size apartments, common areas and large perforations to bring light to the interior of the dense buildings.

This intervention takes place along a street of the Medieval Quarter of Lisbon: Alfama. In spite of it being one of Lisbon’s most beautiful areas, its current state is of great neglect. The project considers the retirement home as a combination of houses with some extra equipments which would favour cohabiting and, at the same time, give each apartment more space of its own.
The prototype house has three strips: two private ones (rooms, bathrooms,...) and one common one (kitchen, lounge,...); the separation between them being a translucent volume wide enough to provide storage. Access to these private areas would be through a third type of spaces: the intermediate ones.





Architectural models regarding the street of the interventions and the buildings in need of such intervention + relation with the city and the abrupt topography.





Prototype apartment and its main elements.





Prototype adapted to a real situation: three bedroom apartment. Tiling as a tool to define the abstract limits between common and private spaces.