Bairro Herculano. Novo estrato num processo de sedimentação

Abstract

Bairro Herculano, a neighbourhood located at Sé, in the city of Porto. A neighborhood with 130 years of history. A neighbourhood highlighted by its huge atmosphere, hidden from everyone's eyes, inside a block. Stagnant in a continuous line of degradation, at the same time as it strengthens the plot of neighbourhood connections, the neighborhood due to the weak connections to the urban network and, likewise, to the sparse maintenance of its own common spaces is hidden from the city and faded in a temporal vector. Thus, the exercise, through these two elements, focuses on intervention for the neighbourhood, where the sedimentation process throughout its history has become unique. The proposal focuses on valuing its brands in time, in a dialogue between the past and the present, starting with a design that emerges as a new stratum that transforms and adapts to the existing one; just as the wind shapes and carves the rocks. The purpose here is to provide a new beginning in the life of the neighborhood, where the intervention manifests itself as a enhancer of new opportunities, through the valorization of the public space. This element appears as a stage of collective memory, where it is important to safeguard the idea of community; as a stage for new possibilities; as a stage for an endless time line, creasing its peculiarity. Each stratum is marked and confronted by a vision of a specific context and this will never be complete. Circumstances change, like life, and are renewed, called into question by evolution, by the acquisition of new information and by the development of the context in which it occurs. In this way, the final proposal appears as a beginning, that will be redesigned, over time and in space, by the human life that the neighbourhood accommodates, in a continuous process of sedimentation.