In 1950, as part of a policy of urban expansion and consolidation in the city of Porto, a neighborhood of 71 houses inspired by the Modern Movement was built, called Cooperativa O Lar Familiar, designed by architect Mário Bonito. Due to its residents and their artistic activities, the neighborhood later earned the nickname Bairro dos Músicos (Musicians' Quarter).

The neighborhood proposed a new urban fabric for that period, with the layout of the public space and blocks facing the street. Typologically, we find townhouse buildings stacked on top of each other, single-family and two-family, with dynamic elevations that combine different colors, oblique roof and façade lines, pilotis, shading canopies, and hollow bricks reinforcing the modern architectural language.

The site combines a big portion of terrain inside Bairro dos Músicos and a portion of terrain facing Ciríaco Cardoso Street, with two different realities which translates into two different types of buildings with two different formal and typological approaches.

One portion of the plot faces Rua Ciríaco Cardoso, a more dense and high-traffic street, and it’s part of a series of collective housing buildings in a row. The other portion of the plot faces Praceta Professor Luis Costa comprising mostly of single-family houses and it’s part of the Bairro dos Músicos neighborhood. The big challenge was to merge these two realities into one holistic vision.

Due to the topography of the site, these two moments couldn’t have a connection between them. Because of that, our proposal is based on creating two different buildings: one as a collective housing turning Rua Ciríaco Cardoso, denser and comprised, mainly of small typologies apartments dedicated especially to short/medium term rental; and the other portion of terrain, quieter and low-traffic, with two volumes of bigger apartments with gardens, dedicated to family living, facing Bairro dos Músicos.

Both buildings, due to their surroundings and their character, adopt different materials and a different relation between them and their surroundings. While one is more urban and adopts new and contemporary materials like metal cladding, with a direct relationship with the street, appropriate for young and dynamic people, the other has a different scale, clad in brick, and a more subtle relationship between inside and outside, suitable for families.