Habitar PortugalHP

Alameda de São Dâmaso, Praça do Toural and Rua de Santo António form a sequence of public spaces along the mediaeval walls of Guimarães that outline an important segment of the area between the city’s historic centre and the area that gradually established themselves outside the walls over the centuries.
As the area revealed many of the polarities that arise in interventions in urban fabrics of a high heritage value – daily use by citizens versus seasonal tourist use; reinterpretation of the heritage versus the creation of an urban ‘museum’; memory in the form of constructions versus traditions – this design approach looked at the public space as an agora, an open place for a progressively multicultural society to express itself.
Thus the design concept sought its foundations in a modern and appropriate interpretation of the place, anchoring the transformation in the notion of the passage of time whilst integrating layers of contemporary urbanity with meanings ingrained in the collective memory.
The spatial regeneration included a traffic control plan that brought to light serious problems (reflected in the town’s deficient support structures for public transport and the manifest excess of space reserved for vehicle traffic, negatively affecting mobility and pedestrian convenience). All these aspects were treated as priority concerns in the design of the intervention.