Friday, April 26, 2013

Sunshine makes the world tick!


On Friday morning we visited the studio of Victor, architect for Arrebita! to see the ongoing building works in his building to get a better understanding of the Portuguese construction. We also took with us some more catalogues to do the finishing touches to A!BOX.

Exploring the building

New steel floor beams over old timber ones

Friday we all; architects and engineers and us had dinner at Jose’s house. It was a great way to meet everyone outside the office and sample some of the boss's cooking and some Portuguese wine!  



We have been working on a presentation which we presented to the architects on Tuesday. Here are some working diagrams from our presentation.

Plan

Kitchen elevation 

Bathroom elevation 


The meeting went well and we treated the architects and engineers to some of our home baked chocolate cake after. 



We saw the Axa building in Aliados which was refurbished and now hosts some works from Portuguese artists.



Bom 25 de Abril! 

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Spring has sprung here in Porto!

This week was a little less intense than previous.

Tuesday some of us went to a conference in which Jose was speaking at, about the social dimension of urban regeneration and Arrebita! at Santa Casa da Misericordia do Porto! Those of us who were not as confident with our Portuguese enjoyed the evening sun. We are continuing to work on the final new A!BOX designs and looking for the last few suppliers. Always getting closer to starting on site!

On Thursday Jose gave a presentation in French with the help of Madalena and Ruth from team 4 presenting Arrebita! to Centre Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris. Where we hope to show an image of Portugal that is positive and forward looking.

Ruth, Madalena and Jose at Centre Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris

While we in team 5 worked away in the studio finalising the material for the A!BOX.

The external finish of the A!Box lets you personalise as you want and the interior will be very shiny!  But we can’t reveal more information right now!

Monday we met with all the Arrebita! architects and showed them our input on the A!BOX and with their feedback we are getting ever closer to finishing the final design. Don’t worrying, we will show you as soon as we have it!

After some busy days trying to define the truly last version of the A!BOX (we hope you’ll love it) we had a cultural rest where we got the opportunity to listen to some local Fado singers.

Secret location !

Wednesday evening we joined a workshop about structural refurbishment by NCREP. For those who don’t speak Portuguese it was an opportunity to learn some Portuguese words and there were some nice pictures.

Ncrep conferences 

Monday, April 8, 2013

Team 5 are here to transform the previous team’s ideas to reality!

Making the most of the sun we made a tour of Porto and did a small photo shoot

We are Giulia Zanforlin (Italy), Catarina Gonçalves(Portugal), Deirbhile Doddy (Ireland), Alicia Gómez Quirantes (Spain),Jonas Roux-Briffaud (France). We are looking forward to getting our hands dirty and transforming the previous team’s work into reality!

On our first day we met with Madalena from Team 4 who showed us around the project and took us to the house we will be working on in Reboleira. On arrival we found a water fall down the upper levels of the stairs. We can´t wait to get started on the roof!

View down stairs of  Rua da Reboleria 42
Day 2 was spent with Ricardo at the “Infor” headquarters participating in an intense but informative ArchiCAD workshop. After a tiring day learning the program which is new for most of us we collected our bikes from “Banco das Bicicletas” which is a partner of Arrebita! supplying the international teams with transport. Cycling will be a challenge with the hills of Porto but we will be fit at the end of 3 months. However, for the first trip we took them on the metro J 

Team 5 and Ricardo Garim Dias, from Infor 

On Wednesday we presented some visiting students from France studying in Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Vol de Seine. They are doinga similar project to Arrebita! in an area of Paris as part of their studies and were interested in what we are doing here in Porto. 

We concluded the day with our first meeting with the engineers where we discussed the any outstanding issues left to us from Team 4 and the new A!Box structure.

To conclude our first week we made our first factory visit to CINCA , where we were given a tour around the showrooms. We saw many types of tiles from typical Azulejo designs to modern bright coloured tiles and everything in between. CINCA gave us a few parting gifts (sample tiles) to play with and to help us in our choice of tiles for the A!Box . We look forward to adding them to the design. 

Jose studying some typical tiles

Discussing the tiles

Team 5 with our tile samples

Today we had a presentation from Porto Vivo, they told us a bit about the history of Porto and the work they are doing in the city. We had a tour of two buildings in Morro da Sé which gave us faith that these works can restore the city. We also received some informative publications about the centre of Porto and the work of Porto Vivo.

Finally we’re looking forward to getting messy in the building, we’ll keep you updated on the progress we’re making with the building. Previous teams and all followers we hope you like the new name A!Box J