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Fundação António Sardinha
A main objective of the António Sardinha Foundation is social care, and this complex was designed to hold both the Maria Isabel Sardinha Nursing Home and the Casa do Sagrado Coração de Jesus Continued Care Hospital.
The design establishes a system of relationships between place, landscape, and the proposed new architectural object. The volume was positioned
by taking into consideration the landscape, appreciating the framing and viewing of the surrounding pine forest, and maintaining the line of the valley virtually unchanged. The volume is suspended over the landscape, affirming the concept of a “bridge building,” which frees the lower space, allowing the flow of the natural context.
The building is oriented east/west, ensuring that the large façades,
room fenestrations, and common areas receive the benefits of sunlight. Constructive options were associated with the intense south sunlight, while framing the natural landscape with an exterior box-shaped building. The building is composed of a transparent body that is marked by a
glass façade and framed by a large concrete plan in a natural gray color, containing internal spaces of distinct materiality.
As to the internal organization, a longitudinal distribution line was emphasized. Along two parallel axes, the space in between confines a central core as the motor of the building, serving all spaces. The building is organized to provide a rich sensory experience due to the rhythmic placement of empty intervals along the axis, formalizing “living spaces.”
The final design represents the symbiosis between place and the introduction of a new contemporary repertoire appropriate to the duties of perceptual/emotional, space/time, and aesthetic/functional. The resulting structure links accuracy and ethics, soul and landscape, and the place and the programmatic idea, with materiality, with sustainability, and with the client.
Pedro Rodrigues Arquitectura Global
Pedro Rodrigues connects his more than 25 years of professional architecture experience with teaching as a professor and international affairs coordinator at the Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa. He thinks of architecture as a demand for a system of relations between a place and
the architectural object. Place is thought of as the strategic interpretation of his team’s projects, which is the guiding principle of all their work, taking advantage of weaknesses and pathologies of places, and of the pre-existing buildings, and turning them into opportunities.
www.pr-arquitecturaglobal.com