ETAR Bragança
Bragança, Portugal
Infrastructure
6.800 m2
2024
The project for the new roof of Bragança’s Water Treatment Plant rethinks an essential piece of infrastructure as a civic and educational landscape. Developed through a public competition promoted by Bragança City Council, the proposal challenges the strictly utilitarian perception of water treatment facilities by introducing public use, recreational value, and environmental awareness into a previously inaccessible structure.
The intervention starts from a simple premise: infrastructure can serve the city in more than one way. By treating the roof as an inhabitable surface rather than a technical enclosure, the project creates a new public space that combines leisure, education, and landscape, while maintaining the operational integrity of the facility below. The result is a layered system where essential urban services and everyday public life coexist.
Spatially, the roof is organised through a modular grid of quadrangular forms that combine vegetation, circulation, and areas designed for temporary or permanent use. This structure supports adaptability across different routines, from school visits and educational programmes to cultural events and informal leisure. The concrete grid rests on pilotis, allowing the intervention to minimise impact on the existing construction and reduce disturbance to the valley’s topography.
This new public surface is conceived as part of a wider territorial system. Pedestrian routes and viewpoints are extended across the site, strengthening its relationship with the surrounding landscape and with Bragança Castle. A continuous walkway along the Fervença River connects the plant to the watercourse, reinforcing the link between natural systems and the infrastructure responsible for water treatment. Existing accesses are preserved and enhanced so the intervention can integrate into the city’s broader network of public space.
If we think that designing a roof also creates new opportunities for the use of this roof, we increase the possibilities of using each building, adding value with practically the same investment.
By expanding the role of a water treatment plant beyond its operational function, the project demonstrates how architecture can add value to existing infrastructures. It proposes a model in which technical necessity, landscape integration, and public use are combined into a single, coherent system, reinforcing infrastructure as an active and meaningful component of the city.
Visual connections between the public roof and the interior operations of the treatment plant are calibrated through controlled moments of transparency. These openings introduce an educational dimension to the experience of the site, allowing visitors to relate the visible processes of treatment to the landscape condition above.
Status
Complete, Open Competition
Awarded 1st prize
Client
Bragança Municipality
Design team
Diogo Sousa Rocha
Duarte Ramalho Fontes
Diogo Parente Mina
Francesco Podda
Sedef Cicekdiken
Amr Ragae
Consultants
Fusão
Mino Works
Noraqua
