Vilamoura Old Casino

Description

The plot where the “Old Casino” development is proposed to be built is part of a context of privileged proximity to the Marina of Vilamoura. It presents a positioning of enormous visual relevance from Avenida João Meireles and Estrada da Quarteira, a landscaped boulevard structuring the surrounding road flows – it will therefore be a relatively striking and iconic architectural complex.

This project intends to reconcile the opening of views to the surroundings, with the search for a specific, qualified and contained spatiality, in a controlled garden space common to the development, which will define its specific identity, its space of memories.

From the implantation of a square figure, two parallel blocks emerge, east and west, in order to provide the dwellings with the best solar orientations, with a height of 5 floors + 1 set back, which define a central space of reference between them. They concentrate the entire housing area inside, as well as part of the retail programme. The amenities and outdoor swimming pools for common use, with smaller volumes, occupy the other two sides of the square polygon, thus defining as a whole a collective and green space in the center of the development, similar to a cloister, an ancestral typology of our history of architecture, which mediates and articulates internal space and external space, architecturally defined and controlled. Having defined the space as a whole, its experience was particularized in a system of exterior sub-spaces, delimited by hedges, as if they were rooms or a house. It is intended to form the basis of an ecosystem of specific, variable spaces, with different dimensions, which define more intimate or more open outdoor environments to install different programs: equipped areas, game areas, rest and meeting areas.

The underground basement occupies the entire admitted implantation polygon and supports the volumes to be built. It allows simple and fluid, uninterrupted and well-sized car circulation inside, on a single floor, and serves as a link between the two housing blocks, guaranteeing direct access to the outside and to the patio.

The edge of the garden peripheral to the constructions seeks to structure and envelop the space between the built mass and the boundary of the lot, in a necessarily freer language, sewing the development through a wide native green area with the built surroundings where it is inserted.

The physical separation between the exterior and interior of the plot provides for the planting of native herbaceous and shrubby buffers which, together with the modeling of the terrain, allows reducing the visual impact of the fences and favors the continuity and spatial integration of the intervention in its context.