Bairro Herculano. Novo estrato num processo de sedimentação

Abstract

Bairro Herculano, a neighbourhood located at Sé, in the city ofPorto. A neighborhood with 130 years of history. A neighbourhoodhighlighted by its huge atmosphere, hidden from everyone's eyes,inside a block.Stagnant in a continuous line of degradation, at the same timeas it strengthens the plot of neighbourhood connections, theneighborhood due to the weak connections to the urban networkand, likewise, to the sparse maintenance of its own commonspaces is hidden from the city and faded in a temporal vector.Thus, the exercise, through these two elements, focuses onintervention for the neighbourhood, where the sedimentationprocess throughout its history has become unique. The proposalfocuses on valuing its brands in time, in a dialogue between thepast and the present, starting with a design that emerges as a newstratum that transforms and adapts to the existing one; just as thewind shapes and carves the rocks.The purpose here is to provide a new beginning in the life ofthe neighborhood, where the intervention manifests itself as aenhancer of new opportunities, through the valorization of thepublic space. This element appears as a stage of collective memory,where it is important to safeguard the idea of community; as astage 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 specificcontext and this will never be complete. Circumstances change,like life, and are renewed, called into question by evolution, bythe acquisition of new information and by the development of thecontext in which it occurs. In this way, the final proposal appearsas a beginning, that will be redesigned, over time and in space,by the human life that the neighbourhood accommodates, in acontinuous process of sedimentation.