On a Morphologically-Based Method for Architectural Practice: The Lindo Vale House

Abstract

This chapter is in two parts. The first part proposes a morphological reading grounded on the town-plan concept. The concept is applied in the analysis of Lindo Vale, a nineteenth-century street in the city of Porto, Portugal, that has suffered profound transformations in the last decades of the twentieth century. The second part of the chapter describes how this morphological approach informs the design of a new house in Lindo Vale. It addresses explicitly one fundamental question of the relation between analysis and design of the urban landscape: what to conserve and what to change? This architectural project conserves the most structural elements of Lindo Vale street and its urban landscape: the plot width, the coincidence between plot frontage and building frontage, the dominant relation between the height of the new building and the width of the street, the overall interior organization of rooms and the position of the staircase within the building. The project introduces a new architectural style, a new façade design and new construction materials. The specific nature of this building as a design answer to a particular urban landscape is highlighted through a comparison with two other buildings designed by its authors in the city of Porto—one in a medieval street, the other in a street built in the first half of the twentieth century.