Matinha Urban Plan Park

The masterplan follows the working logic of Carlos Moreno’s 15-minute city and the LEED for Neighborhood Development standard, aiming to keep housing, work, services and green space close enough together that daily needs can be met on foot or by bike. Buildings sit in compact clusters that vary in height, each following the same vertical order: ground and lower floors stay public and porous, holding shared spaces, retail and smaller units, while upper floors carry larger, more private dwellings, and rooftops hold the most distinct units in the scheme. A 3.75 by 3.75 metre grid runs through the buildings and the ground between them, keeping construction repeatable while leaving the layout free to change over time. At street level, cafés, a bakery, a pharmacy and market stalls open directly onto the public realm, and shared amenities for residents sit in the courtyards and building cores.

Housing runs across five typologies for around 771 apartments. A modular type builds around prefabricated kitchen and bathroom cores with movable partitions that let a unit reconfigure as a household changes. A single house type brings a private garden or terrace into an apartment inside a larger block. Formal and informal housing share the same footprint but differ in how fixed the partitions are. An evolutive type slides walls to let a unit expand or contract in place, so a T0 can become a T1 without anyone moving out, and penthouses run as duplexes across the top two floors.

Façade materials shift block by block, with stone and timber in some places and carbon-neutral cladding in others, built over a consistent concrete frame. Passive measures come first environmentally, with orientation, massing and façade depth managing solar gain before any mechanical system does, supported by rooftop photovoltaics, harvested rainwater, smart metering and native planting on green roofs and courtyards. Construction follows the same grid structurally and can take CLT, concrete or a hybrid of the two, using prefabricated façades, stairs and bathroom pods that arrive finished and connect on site.

The project works inside the Allotment Plan’s own limits, using cantilevered volumes across up to half the façade and balconies that don’t count toward floor area to bring more variation into the massing than a flat compliance reading would allow. A leaner mix of unit types cuts parking demand and, with it, around 34,000 square metres of underground construction, and stacking penthouses as duplexes keeps the building below the height that would otherwise require a dedicated fire refuge floor.