With a vast built heritage, Lisbon's contemporary architectural production is rich in rehabilitation projects. Lacking space for new buildings - unless one is willing to pay for the land's high market price - Lisbon's current architecture prescinds tabula rasa and faces the challenge of working with what already exists - often limiting itself to design only interior spaces.
Rotation, displacement, and interleaving of blocks are some of the options that enable the diversity of raw brick patterns in architecture. The shape of these elements, usually used for the construction of walls, has been explored in a creative way to compose facades of residential buildings, representing the formal identity of the building itself and its relationship with its context.
Schauman & Nordgren Architects, a Copenhagen and Helsinki based architecture and urban planning studio, was selected as the winner of the two-stage competition, organized by the city of Turku in Finland, to transform a former elderly home site into a new 15.000 m2 housing neighborhood.
It is an inevitable truth that the world population is growing exponentially. Higher numbers can only lead to a higher demand for resources, food, and housing. By the year 2100, the 7.6 billion people currently living on earth will reach, according to the UN, a whopping 11.2 billion.
This increase can only mean that the need to accommodate these people will become an urgent priority, innovating and shifting from the household system that is present nowadays. Soon enough this will be a global pressing issue.