Quadratum
Oporto, Portugal
Housing
4.978 m2
2024
Located in Aldoar, Oporto, the Red Plot project occupies a site defined by transition and expectation. Positioned at the edge of a consolidated urban front and adjacent to future infrastructure developments linked to the UOPG 3 (Aldoar), the plot sits within a fragment of the city still in formation. The project responds to this intermediate condition by proposing a compact residential volume that consolidates the existing alignment while anticipating the area’s gradual transformation.
The intervention consists of a collective housing building with 30 units, organised across nine floors above ground and two levels of parking partially embedded in the site’s natural slope. The volume is defined by a square plan, positioned to respect regulatory setbacks from the EN12 while reinforcing the emerging urban frontage. Rather than dispersing the built mass, the strategy concentrates construction into a clear and legible geometry, preserving a predominantly permeable perimeter and establishing a green buffer toward the future public realm.
A central circulation core structures each floor, around which four apartments are arranged, ensuring efficient layouts and balanced orientation. The typological mix, ranging from T1 to T4 units, allows the building to accommodate diverse household structures within a coherent architectural system. Parking and technical areas are integrated into the semi-buried levels, freeing the ground plane and minimising visual impact.
The architectural language emerges directly from structural logic. A perimeter grid of columns extends beyond the façade line, simultaneously supporting the building and defining its identity. Between structure and enclosure, a continuous horizontal element operates as a planted threshold, becoming a balcony planter where accessible. In this way, structure, façade and inhabitation are not separate layers but part of the same system. The building’s envelope becomes both tectonic expression and environmental device, mediating light, shade and privacy.
Height and proportion are calibrated to stitch together the larger institutional scale of the nearby hospital complex and the emerging residential fabric. The project does not seek singularity through gesture, but coherence through alignment, proportion and constructive clarity. By consolidating this fragment of the Circunvalação front, the Clip Housing Project contributes to the gradual completion of a currently fragmented urban edge, transforming an expectant plot into a structured and legible piece of the city.
Status
Ongoing, Private
Client
TAGA Urbanic
Design team
Diogo Sousa Rocha
Duarte Ramalho Fontes
Filipa Ferreira
Paulo Vale Afonso
Gabriel Gaspar
Tânia Marques
Rita Pinho
Vasco Sousa
Nuno Gameiro
Consultants
A400
MOQ Engineering
Gabriel Couto
CTJX
