After the Gomos#1 prototype and the exhibition in La Biennale di Venezia, SUMMARY studio projects a new building using its concrete modular GOMOS system.
This project was born in order to build housing and multi–services spaces, in a common roadside area in Vale de Cambra, Portugal. The client required that the construction should be fast, cost effective and changeable over time, which prompted the studio to use prefabricated elements and to leave parts of the project undefined.
In Alejandro Aravena words, “SUMMARY’s proposed set of prefabricated
elements has managed to balance the logics of prefabricated infrastructure and architecture as support”*. This project configures a practical example of this architectural approach, assuming the immediacy, flexibility and resources
optimization as the core themes.
The strategy is clear: a ground floor level for the multi-services program
connected with the public space, crowned by the individual habitational units. Due to the differences between the two programs, it was created an
independent access for each function, placing them in different levels and
taking advantage of the natural ground’s slope.
The ground floor is composed by prefabricated slabs and structural panels in the whole exterior perimeter. Considering the building’s location, in a road-side area where everything changes too fast, the multi-services space is conceived in a very flexible way: the internal compartmentalization is made with
removable panels with inner rails for the distribution of water and electricity systems. This enables future adjustments and modifications: it’s possible to add or remove compartments or let the whole level function as an open space. Thus, the users will make their own space, according to the program at hand.
The first floor is all composed of Gomos System units. Considering that the maximum building area permitted by law was quite short, the requested empty space was used to separate the housing units. Concepted and licensed as a
collective housing building, with this split this project offers the main
advantages of single houses: clearly individualized entrances and a complete acoustic separation between the different units.
The Vale de Cambra project construction just started and it will be finished within the end of 2017.
*Curator’s Rationale, about the SUMMARY installation (INFRASTRUCTURE-STRUCTURE-ARCHITECTURE) at La Biennale di Venezia 2016 “Reporting from the Front”.
SUMMARY is a young architectural studio based in the Science and Technology Park of University of Porto, Portugal, founded by Samuel Gonçalves in 2015. Seeking the balance between pragmatism and experimentalism, this practice aims for solutions that could answer a prominent challenge that the contemporary world places to architecture: how to make the construction act an increasingly summary process?
Vale de Cambra
Portugal
Carlos Moreira
940 sq. m
SUMMARY Architects
Samuel Gonçalves, Gonçalo Vaz de Carvalho, Maria João Freitas, Inês Vieira, Alban Wagener
Farcimar
Farcimar
Building Pictures (GOMOS System Prototype), Tiago Casanova (La Bienale di Venezia), Alban Wagener (Renderings of Vale de Cambra)
Curriculum
Seeking the balance between pragmatism and experimentalism, this young studio aims for solutions to answer a prominent challenge that the contemporary world places to architecture: how to make the construction act an increasingly summary process?
SUMMARY developed the “GOMOS Building System”, which highlights the optimization of the construction processes as the core theme of its practice.
In 2016, SUMMARY was selected to present the work “INFRASTRUCTURE-STRUCTURE-ARCHITECTURE” at the main exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
