Arco 1870

This project concerns the transformation of a late 19th-century building constructed using the Pombaline construction system, listed as a property of public interest. Rehabilitation and extension works are permitted, provided the architectural character of the building is preserved. Originally conceived as a single-family dwelling, it has been altered many times over the decades, accumulating certain constructional and spatial inconsistencies along the way, yet never losing the spatial quality and character that define it.

Like so many historic buildings in Lisbon, it has become a material and architectural palimpsest: layer upon layer of paint in ever more synthetic finishes; sanitary facilities grafted on long after the building first stood; steel where there was once only timber and stone; wooden joinery quietly swapped for aluminium. A slow accumulation of non-renewable materials, each intervention pulling the building a little further from its origins.

The aim, therefore, is to make sense of the two distinct periods at work here: the heritage dimension, which holds the identity of the building through its spatial and constructional character, and the contemporary moment, shaped by the demands and rhythms of life today. The proposed intervention seeks to open a clear dialogue between past and present, between Heritage and Innovation.

Matter becomes the investigation tool.

Crucially, these new elements are designed to be reversible. Freestanding and non-structural, they leave no permanent trace on the historic structure. Should future needs or ways of living demand it, they can be removed entirely, leaving the building open to futures yet unimagined. In this sense, reversibility becomes not merely a technical strategy but an act of resilience, so that the building may, one day, be read anew, and undone, without erasing what came before.