HANAMICHI, 2014
Fundão is a city in a sub-region of central Portugal, denominated Cova da Beira — a plateau enclosed by mountain ranges. The foothills of the contiguous Serra da Gardunha have vast plantations of cherry IGP that paint this natural amphitheatre as a blooming auspice for the coming of spring and the harvest campaign: its climax. The ensuing flux of people, either motivated by economic activities or leisure, dwells on evanescent floral paths.
The hanamachi is an extension of the stage, in Japanese kabuki theatre, used by entering or exiting characters, that allows the actors to walk into the audience to receive flowers after a performance.
The hanamachi is an extension of the stage, in Japanese kabuki theatre, used by entering or exiting characters, that allows the actors to walk into the audience to receive flowers after a performance.
Qualifying the lot as a meeting node for the cherry trail (rota da cereja) is the structural premise for the arrangement of the given program: the Fundão Food Center — a farmers' cooperative, an hospitality school with its application restaurant and lodging.
The entrance gate to the seminary and the adjacent water tank are ennobled through a forecourt verging the junction between the former rural path, the main route and the road to Alcongosta — where the trail enroots. From there, sheered by a continuous rill, unfolds an experimental cherry orchard whose regular and unpaved spacing conveys a constancy claiming to be disrupted by drifts and successive traverses summoned by structures enunciable of the spaces beneath — either marking the accesses, the limits or serving as water and light-wells.
Adjusting the terrain of the lot, softening the peripheral eastern slope whilst distancing from the main road, based on its medial elevation (at 520) where the orchard rests, allows the subjacent spaces to articulate with due privacy, detaching towards the limits. The glacis, then, transposes a line of asymmetry to the internal faces, and the landform becomes present within. Walls of reinforced concrete figuratively disintegrate to its framework when tangential to the terrain outside, allowing a filtrated light to permeate through gabions that sustain the living roof, withal outwardly supporting terraces where to expand the orchard. The addition of tinted glass pebbles to the granite filling of the gabions increases and hues the light intake according to the space it serves.
The entrance gate to the seminary and the adjacent water tank are ennobled through a forecourt verging the junction between the former rural path, the main route and the road to Alcongosta — where the trail enroots. From there, sheered by a continuous rill, unfolds an experimental cherry orchard whose regular and unpaved spacing conveys a constancy claiming to be disrupted by drifts and successive traverses summoned by structures enunciable of the spaces beneath — either marking the accesses, the limits or serving as water and light-wells.
Adjusting the terrain of the lot, softening the peripheral eastern slope whilst distancing from the main road, based on its medial elevation (at 520) where the orchard rests, allows the subjacent spaces to articulate with due privacy, detaching towards the limits. The glacis, then, transposes a line of asymmetry to the internal faces, and the landform becomes present within. Walls of reinforced concrete figuratively disintegrate to its framework when tangential to the terrain outside, allowing a filtrated light to permeate through gabions that sustain the living roof, withal outwardly supporting terraces where to expand the orchard. The addition of tinted glass pebbles to the granite filling of the gabions increases and hues the light intake according to the space it serves.
