João de Almada award for the rehabilitation of Casa São Roque and the building on Rua da Restauração

The winners of the 19th edition of the João de Almada Award, created by Porto City Hall to encourage and promote the rehabilitation of the city’s architectural heritage, awarding every two years the best examples of good practice in this area, have already been chosen.

The rehabilitation of Casa São Roque, by João Mendes Ribeiro, was unanimously considered by the jury of the 19th edition of the João Almada award as the best intervention in the “Non-residential Buildings” category.

The old Casa da Quinta da Lameira, which belonged to the Ramos Pinto family, is considered one of the most remarkable buildings of the eastern area of the city of Porto. It was in a process of degradation for several decades, with loss of heritage assets. This intervention, that refurbished the house and transformed it into an Art Centre, bringing it back to public delight, also gave it back much of its former splendour.

The jury recognised in the work “a special care in the rehabilitation of all the heritage assets and in the interpretation of the original typologies, exemplarily fulfilling the criteria of architectural appreciation foreseen in the competition programme”. It was also valued “the effort in the rehabilitation of all the garden area surrounding the house”, reviving the relation between indoors and outdoors.

In the “Residential Buildings” category, the award was given to the rehabilitation of a building on Rua da Restauração. The project signed by the architect Eduardo Souto Moura stood out from the other competitors, and the jury found this rehabilitation remarkable.

The building on Rua da Restauração, 429 is representative of the bourgeois house of Porto of the 19th century and early 20th, framed in a fundamental typology in understanding the urban and architectural identity of the city. The jury points out the “the care and rigour of this intervention”, which they considered met “with merit the assessment parameters established in the competition program, namely by the sensitivity and coherence with which the heritage assets are interpreted and recovered”.

The 19th Edition of the João de Almada award took place in the middle of the pandemic, which may have caused the suspension or delay of several rehabilitation works in progress in the city. Even so, 14 applications were admitted to the competition. After a preliminary selection of the works presented and a visit to the respective works, the jury chose the winners of the award, a decision that has been approved by the Municipal Executive.

The Award has a pecuniary value of 10 thousand euros for each category (“Residential Buildings” and “Non-residential Buildings”, corresponding to 7 thousand euros to the architect responsible for the winning project and 3 thousand euros to the owner of the site.

The jury for this edition was chaired by the Mayor of Porto, Rui Moreira, and also made up of the architects Rodrigo Coelho, representing the College of Architecture of the University of Porto; Amândio Dias, representative of the Regional Directorate of Culture of the North; Gabriel Andrade, representing the Ordem dos Arquitetos – Northern Regional Section; Miguel Pinto, representing the Municipal Directorate of Urban Planning; Luís Aguiar Branco, representative of the Municipal Department of Cultural Management; and Tiago Figueiredo (Figueiredo + Pena Arquitetos) and Nuno Graça Moura, winners of the previous edition of the João de Almada Award, in the Residential and Non-Residential categories, respectively, and also by the engineer Bento Machado Aires, representing the Order of Engineers – North Region.

The next Editions of the João de Almada Award will take place in 2023, and renovations completed by May of that year can be submitted for competition.