Light & houses in Porto
Published on: 5th of January 2012
Current city: Lisbon
To celebrate my 100th post I decided to go to Oporto for the very end of my Light World Tour. 315 km north of Lisbon, we actually call it Cidade Invicta (Unvanquished / unbeaten city) or Porto which means literally Port from where the Port Wine takes its name from. Located along Douro River it is another city where life is very much connected to water.
On my mission to search for lighting inspirations I met up with architect Nuno Valentim who kindly became my lighting guide in the city. Nuno Valentim is an architect that has a very interesting work especially in the field of heritage restoration and refurbishment. The advantage of meeting locals is that I always end up having personalised guided tours that as a tourist I would never have the chance to have. In addition, Nuno knows a lot about everything so he always had an interesting fact or story about each place we visited.
We started our tour by visiting a very exquisite chapel that he designed in 2000 for a University Centre. With a very restricted brief and budget Nuno decided to make a ´mirror box’ that would reflect the surroundings. As a play of reflection and transparency it is a small space where natural light fills the space and the ´soul´.
We moved on to a Civic Centre for the immigrant community, a building which architecture is very much characterised by the inner courtyards that allow for natural lighting to reach all the spaces in the building. The sun was shining when we were there and the atmosphere was very pleasant in such a bright space.
As expected we didn´t visit only newly built constructions, Nuno was so enthusiastic about finding light inspirations in Porto that he suggested to visit a few examples of old houses that have been recently refurbished, but kept the original main features of the typical houses. Traditional architecture in Porto is quite unique: the plots are so narrow and deep that natural light has always been a concern in housing architecture.
The first house I visited was Casa Andresen refurbished by Nuno´s practice. The former owners of this house - the Andresen – had a granddaughter that was a famous Portuguese writer: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. This house seemed to be an obvious source of inspiration for some passages of her books. The adjacent gardens are inserted in the Botanical Gardens area and the house has been adapted currently to house an exhibition hall. The double ceiling height, the large windows, the skylight as the core of the building contribute to the spaciousness and light that you find in this house which is quite impressive and inspiring.
From there Nuno called a friend, Luís Mendonça, known by Gémeo Luís, a very talented illustrator, so I could a visit a typical bourgeois house that Luís and his architect wife Paula have restored. The houses in Porto always have a skylight to bring light in and they vary according to the typology. In here the skylight was placed just above the staircase, located in the centre of the house. Needless to say Gémeo Luís has an amazing art collection and illustrations from all over the world, so I felt really privileged to visit it, it was like going to a private museum.
Gémeo Luís on the other hand suggested we visited a typical merchants´ house in Ribeira area, in the historic centre of the city, an UNESCO heritage site. Ribeira is a neighbourhood just next to the river and due to its location, it was where most of economic activities took place. This housing typology was different from the previous ones but again a skylight in the centre of the building provided the natural lighting needed for working and living.
I had an amazing tour and Nuno and I finished it by having lunch with architect Sofia Thenaisie, another light enthusiast, who organises at Porto´s Architecture School a seminar on designing light. Every two years she invites professionals from all over the world to present lighting projects at this seminar.
On the skylights, Sofia and Nuno assured me that Porto has a lot of these beautiful examples and that there is a project from an architect / lighting creative Sheila Kennedy to recover and use these skylights has part of a light installation. I was happy to know that there is another designer that had found them as fascinating as I did. This was a great lesson on lighting history and on residential natural lighting, a subject that I hadn´t had the chance to cover yet!
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