Contemporary On Rehabilitation of Popular Architecture

Abstract

As architects, we must respect and protect the identity and the Genius Loci of the place we intervene. Popular Portuguese architecture, as one of the references chosen for this investigation, consists of housing clusters whose need arose from population growth. This type of construction uses local materials that lose their identity when removed from this context. Ruins of shale or granite, only with its imposing walls, located in strategic places due to subsistence reasons, with a subtle history and culture, maintain intact its essence and character to inhabit. It is increasingly important, necessary and urgent to protect this heritage, where there are precious lessons to be learnt from coherent and harmonious villages, with a functional simplicity, framed in the landscapes that surround them. Recovering the heritage, being in many cases in the phase of ruin, allows architects to conjugate new concepts within the existing ones. Starting from the analysis of all these premises and of the need to rehabilitate these places, a modular system composed of metallic structures with an L-shaped profile was developed. This conceptual and building system consists of loose elements, for a better adaptation to each place, client and topography, gaining an identity in each composition. The choice of steel profiles allows the architectural project to acquire aspects such as the lightness of the conceptual language, resistance to internal efforts and minimisation of the selectable area, together with easy transport and handling in the assembly during construction. These are some of the characteristics that justify the use of these steel profiles in the rehabilitation of ruins, creating a repetitive modular system, as if it was a “living organism” that interrelates to the existing one.