A market in Portugal becomes a welcoming monument for the city

All over the world, markets are places not only for commercial exchange but also for meeting and relationships, around which lively urban dynamics often unfold. In Caminha, in the north of Portugal, these dynamics were compromised by the fact that the old market was a rundown, obsolete building completely disconnected from its context. Loftspace and Tiago Sousa's intervention fits into the area of the former market, demolished to make room for a new building, with the aim of reconfiguring the market as a vibrant and attractive public space, in constant dialogue with the city.

The new building stands out in the context with a sober and austere monumentality that makes it a strongly recognisable landmark: a parallelepiped volume lightened on the fronts by a subtle and elegant weave of pillars echoing David Chipperfied's lexicon of rigorous geometries and slender and tight grids, as well as the formal and material solutions prefigured by Giorgio Grassi and Antonio Monestiroli for the design of the Student House in Chieti, Italy, in the 1970s. The clear interpretation of the urban setting determines the planivolumetrical layout of the building, which “opens up” to the city through the portico facing the Minho riverfront to the west, towards the city to the south and east, and “closes” to the north in the technical area reserved for the staff.

Rough exposed concrete, the main material of the composition, gives the work a blunt and rough Brutalist character, only partially diluted on the outside by the basement cladding in warm-toned Molianos stone. The interior space, marked by a clear modular grid, is divided into functional areas: to the south, shops and services open to the city, to the north the technical area with changing rooms, cold rooms, offices and waste area. The fulcrum of the composition is the central area destined for the fish and fruit market, dominated by the vigorous exposed beams of the roof structure and radiated with light that generously penetrates through the large windows.