Tower 261 by Just an Architect in Amarente, Portugal

Project: Tower 261 Architects: Just an Architect Location: Amarente, Portugal Area: 10 225 sq ft Photography: Ivo Tavares Studio

Tower 261 by Just an Architect

Urbanistically, the site corresponds to two different scales. To the north — a scale of four- and five-story buildings, to the south — at the intersection of the access road to Rossio Park, after which the scale changes to two-story and single-family home typology. Thus, in order to avoid sharp and rigid facades, we applied floor rotations, shifting them up to four different heights, which creates special movements and shadows.

This rotation allows creating a game of various impressions, where apartment orientations differ and have different viewpoints in contact with the surrounding landscape. The building development follows along the corner of the site, starting from this point, the residential block twists, while vertical services protrude as a unifying element that closes the street with a regular facade form but visually transparent cladding material reveals the development of the building on other facades.

The proposal is implemented transversely to the terrain, allowing more sunlight and reducing earthworks volumes. The form is built on understanding of place and its surroundings. The first floor tends toward more honest relationships with the ground at a low level, adopting a regular base relative to the street, thus allowing other floors to reflect various influences of the environment and create different framing points for each floor and living spaces, giving them a unique and distinctive character where each living space becomes an element with its own identity and characteristics. The volume play not only creates various landscape frames but also allows creating unique outdoor spaces, as this space is always closely linked to the relationship between the roof of the lower floor and the covering of the upper one.

In this context, staircases and vertical services play an important role since they define the street facade, unifying all floors and stabilizing a rather sharp facade caused by movements and tensions from these twists.

The proposal includes a program with 4 types of apartments with two rooms and two types of apartments with three rooms. Regarding T2 apartments, all have internal corridors within the floor, so they always leave the facade area for rooms, allowing them to be in contact with the landscape and integrating it into all rooms as part of decoration. The same concept of landscape integration was transferred to the T3 apartment type, in which the fact that it occupies the entire floor allows placing corridors right after the entrance zone of the house, clearly defining the most public and private part of the house, protecting the latter.

- Project description and images provided by Ivo Tavares Studio