Award – Equipment Building Rehabilitation
CARANDÁ CULTURAL MARKET, BRAGA
PROMOTER: Municipality of Braga
COORDINATOR DESIGNER: Architect Eduardo Souto de Moura
CONSTRUCTORS: BRITALAR – Sociedade de Construções, S.A.; FDO Projetos, Lda. / FDO Construções, S.A.
This intervention implies the rehabilitation of the memory of a market in the city of Braga. When peripheral walls, paths, equipment and part of the structure are preserved, we are left with the symbolic image of the spatiality that characterized the space. The transmutation of a food market to a cultural market is also done using new construction, this with a language of great beauty and contemporaneity. – (jury appreciation)

When I designed the market twenty years ago, the idea was to make a covered street, a fragment of a city capable of proposing an urban fabric. This network happened, it happened too much, and the market drowned out between schools, nightclubs and unrestrained real estate speculation. During this time, in the several visits I made to the ruin, I noticed that the market was used as a bridge, as a street, a necessary crossing between two axes of the city. In this project I propose to remove the roof, design a garden, a street and build the “cultural” program in the little that is left. 1st Phase – Dance School. This phase is considered to be divided, in spatial terms, into three plots: the first, goes from alignment with the street to the first transverse stone wall; the second refers to the old market; the third, the part of the land located to the north, between the limit of the old market (fish stand) and the limit of the land. 2nd Phase – Music School. The present phase is characterized by two stages of work: the first consists of the partial demolition of the existing building, maintaining some of its constructive elements, namely the stairs and some pillars, as a testament to the pre-existence; the second, in the construction of a new building that will be used for a music school.
(extract from Descriptive Memory)