Intervalo
Almada, Portugal
Housing
12.600 m2
2023
Intervalo is a housing project located on Rua da Bela Vista, in Almada, set among neighbouring residential blocks. In this context, new construction tends to read as a continuous mass, reinforcing a suburban landscape of barriers rather than spaces of relation. The project starts from this condition and responds by working with rhythm. A back-and-forth sequence of openings and closures is woven through the building, breaking its monolithic presence and allowing the façade to mediate between domestic privacy and the public realm.
This modulation is not treated as an image, but as a way of organising daily life. The project proposes the module not as a self-contained unit, but as movement. Space is conceived through the way it is perceived between elements and through the actions it hosts over time. Architecturally, this results in a clear organising system, a succession of walls and vertical elements that define uses through alignment and visual connection, structuring how residents move, pause, and inhabit the building.
Within this chain of uses, the wall becomes the project’s primary device. It operates as a backdrop that oscillates between openness and enclosure, supporting a continuous negotiation between public, collective, and private domains. The interplay of planes and gaps is not used to produce emptiness, but to add spatial density through overlap, allowing habit and time to become part of the architectural conception.
By treating space as a sequence of relationships rather than a fixed object, the project reinterprets suburban housing as a connected set of conditions. It preserves individual space while creating the proximity, legibility, and shared thresholds through which a community can emerge in everyday life.
Status
Complete, Open Competition
Client
IHRU
Design team
Anna Manunta
Diogo Sousa Rocha
Duarte Ramalho Fontes
Içim Atli
José Girão
Consultants
Oh!Land Studio
Adão da Fonseca – Engenheiros Consultores
BISTO
BARBAR
