The project for the Queluz National Palace Square is part of a process of urban regeneration, an instrument to reinvent a new urban space as a pole of a metropolitan network.
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As part of the city of Queluz the square has an important role as reference space, environmental and cultural. While urban space functions as a social and cultural space, related to collective memory, capable of acting as a generator of collective and public interactions.
The ability to transform this public space into a contemporary social space, without erasing the collective and individual memory, endowing the drawn elements with meaning has become the main objective of the project.
The proposal interprets the objectives of the contest, pointing the water as a structuring element of the local urban space in which it reveals its capacity to interrelate natural and cultural contents.
The complexity of the square construction, relationships of symmetry, scale, composition of fillings and voids, prospective effects and details of composition, evident in the design of the original project, contrasts with its current fragmented existence, which distorts the elements that compose the square.
The images found, from the beginning and middle of the 20th century, show us the Palace Square as a meeting place, a place of fair under the pavement of earth. In fact the original name of the square brings us to its existence Terreiro, public space which pavement is in earth (terra).
The poor condition of basalt flooring is currently one of the main reasons for discomfort that impedes the full use of space.
In this sense, we propose a unitary reading space, in which the elements of water / drainage together with the vegetal mass give form to the original baroque square.
The formal unit that allows to realize the Terreiro is given by the use of a continuous paving of pigmented concrete based on aggregates of local earth (clay and limestone). On the other hand the subtle marking of pedestrian routes and routes of circulation are made in limestone.
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Competition for the Requalification of the Queluz National Palace Square
Classification: 1st place
Architecture: Office x
Consultants:
Landscape Architecture: Paulo Palma
Hydraulic engineering: Ricardo Canelas
Collaborators: Manuel Minto (Architect); Luca Covello
Promotor: Parques De Sintra – Monte da Lua S.A.
