Marvila LAB: imagining collective housing in Lisbon

Abstract

Farms, factories, silos, cranes, old warehouses, convents, streets, paths, passages, small squares... from large infrastructures to the fragmented housing fabric, the urban space of Lisbon's eastern riverfront is constituted as a complex and extremely heterogeneous.
Therefore, and given the need to precede the disintegration and irreversible discontinuity between urban fabrics, memories and urban elements in this area of the city, it is important to reflect on innovative urban intervention processes that know how to interpret the typological richness of the place and that provide answers to current problems such as the lack of housing and its relevance in the transformation of public space.
Taking an international design workshop as a framework, the article presents the results developed by this pedagogical experience that takes Marvila as a laboratory to reflect on housing systems that break the rigid limits between architectural objects and the city. The workshop draws on material produced by the research project “Building Typology” (FCT: PTDC/ART-DAQ/30110/2017), to propose urban and architectural strategies for recycling, reuse and transformation that suggest reactivation of abandoned spaces and new connections to buildings and public space. The design studios were challenged to design collective urban habitats that, based on the imagination of housing spaces, constituted architectural systems of transition between public space and private space.
Five distinct types of abandoned buildings located in the eastern part of Lisbon – warehouse, convent, factory, palace, working-class villas – were adopted as the object of study to rethink five alternative ways of living: Atelier House, Minimum House, Common House, Dispersed House , Recovery House. The workshop sought to systematize housing hypotheses where the building typology and the housing program are the support for the creation of architectural-urban scenarios that reconfigure the surrounding urban habitat.