Moutidos Leisure Park
Águas Santas, Maia
1997 - 2001
Placed in a territory marked by strong tensions between the recent built mesh, small areas of trees and others of agricultural use, the project should have the capacity regulate the difficult balance among such different occupation types, seemingly unable, in its whole, to endow of structure the place.
The project is based in the presupposition that is a physically defined park, in this case a vital condition of the urban character that is wanted for it.
The physical limits that configure this great enclosure are defined through the employment of two different materials, respective constructive techniques and consequent sensorial perceptions, and they are organized in two categories corresponding to the two realities that coexist in the territory: one that can be characterize as being of a more urban vocation, that corresponds to the schools, the habitation nucleus and the whole strip built adjacent to the street form which the park has front; and another one, it’s rural character, that progressively it has been loosing, constituted by small agricultural exploration nucleus and for great farms that are located to the nascent.
The way of disposing the objects inside the enclosure is based in the repetition of a simple element that is deployed to answer differentiated uses, sometimes constituting small groupings, other times existing dispersed or simulating alignments. Its placement is not casual, on the contrary, they are organized according to an order that imposes a punctuation in the territory constituting as a appeal to the memory of urban images from other positions.
This repetition of elements presupposes its reason to be, the one that gives it sense, in the conviction that the city has always been built more through the repetition than through the exception and that the repetition is not necessarily synonym of monotony.
The simplicity that here is pursued hides a multiple organism, obtained starting from several sediments and, just as the Nature, in which the simple is always and only apparent, it hides the true complexity of which it is done.
