A Garagem no Edifício de Habitação Colectiva

Abstract

The garage is a space created for the car. Associated with housing, it gains a new dimension, capable of overcoming the mere function of storage. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the car driven primarily by a chauffeur, the garage was introduced in the building of collective housing as a service space. With the increasing use of this vehicle, it became an entry and a common space for residents. It is the place where we get out of our car, leaving behind the "confusion" of the city, beginning the journey to the privacy of our apartment. If in the single-family house, the garage often becomes more valuable as an additional room, in the collective housing it rarely loses the nature of a service area. In the imagination of most people it gets little value and importance, without realizing that often it is the common space more used inside the building. In Portugal, the architecture constantly sends the garage to an underground floor, without considering its importance as an entry and a collective space, and mainly as a space that, in addition to the car, also lives of the people who use it. Leaving behind the concept of underground parking, this dissertation starts the (re)discovery of other ways of designing this space. High on the first floor or in the roof, open or closed, inside or outside of the private space of each dwelling, the garage can take many features that are analyzed in this work, in order to understand the effects they produce in the building, concerning its internal organization and expression to the outside, trying to understand the different relationships that are created between the garage and the houses and the other common spaces such as pedestrian entrances, accesses, vertical or horizontal, or the courtyard. It is also analyzed the parameters that led to the garage been set in a different way, from the more pragmatic, essentially economic, to the more theoretical, on which the vehicle is assumed as a work of art. It matters then, to "give way" to a different understanding of the garage, re-evaluating its position in the building of collective housing.