A casa da Granja: um espaço em transformação

Abstract

The core of this research work and thesis are focused on the rehabilitation of the Quinta da Casa da Granja, which is located on the surroundings of Brito's parish, which belongs to Guimarães. The Quinta is inserted in a little urbanized area, yet highly marked by a significant agricultural and rural landscape. Even though the parish of Brito has been under some changes over the years, giving place to new houses and modern constructions, the Quinta, as well as its surrounding space, still is a private and intimate atmosphere with a strong connection with the Nature itself in which its fields for farming inhere the landscape. This rehabilitation aims not only to qualify the existing buildings and equipments in the Quinta, but also the construction of new equipment in order to make possible to insert this program in the scope of Rural Tourism. This intervention and the program itself were aimed to unite the Quinta's own land and identify its competencies, so that the client could benefit from it. The old house, which is currently considered devoluted and in ruins, will be restored along this project, assuring, preserving and dignifying its memory no lugar. New stables were drawn since the previous and existing ones proved to be precarious and insufficient for the purpose in which they were first intended. To complement these buildings and to make it possible to assume them as proper to receive guests, a housing project with five rooms and a common kitchen and living room were designed. The drawn greenhouse is one element more of the project and also it is obviously one of the offers for this tourism program bringing advantages both for the guests, allowing them to contact directly with the agricultural activity, as for the client, who can assure and enjoy from a sustainable own production space for her consumption. For the development and outgrowth of this work it was both imperative and necessary to study buildings with similar programs in order to understand the inherent needs to its own right development.