Terraços de Bragança Housing
Álvaro Siza

The Terraços de Bragança housing, services and shopping complex will occupy some 5,000 sq.m in area, in a lot situated between the António Maria Cardoso and Alecrim streets, which appears as a hiatus to be filled in a perfectly consolidated zone.

There has been the preoccupation to create a dialogue with the surrounds, and from it find the prime defining reasons for the project; as well as making an attentive reading of the terrain, its topography and the marks left by those who have lived in it and given it sense.

These marks revert to at least the beginning of the 14th century, when the Fernandine Defensive Wall was completed. The construction of this defensive structure clearly defined the limit of the city.

The demolitions undertaken on the land some 20 years ago revealed a length of the Wall, clearly visible today.
This set of foundations divides the terrain roughly in half, in the longitudinal direction, in parallel with the roads that were meanwhile opened. This topological, geographic and historical cleavage dividing the terrain into two, and linking the parts to their preferred access roads, is assumed by the project, both in morphological and programmatic terms.

 Project Conjunto Habitacional Terraços de Bragança
 Location Lisboa
 Date 1992/2004
 Architects Álvaro Siza Coordenadores: 1a fase – Clemente Menéres (Estudo Prévio) 2a fase – Miguel Nery
 Collabortors Ashton Richards, Francesca Montalto, Claúdia Vogel, Cristina Ferreirinha, Vitor Oliveira, Michele Gigante, Maria Moita, Mitsunori Nakamura, Atsushi Ueno, Tomoko Kawai
 Client Imopólis – Sociedade Gestora de Fundos de Investimento Imobiliário, S.A. (Gestora do Fundo de Investimento Imobiliário Fechado Imodesenvolvimento)
 Photo José Manuel Rodrigues