Anguera

This is a project filled with singularities.

A project that is as much about what is built as it is about its communication.

Located at the heart of Sertão, in northeast Brazil, Anguera is a small 10 000 inhabitants city with a trading based economy, serving as a commercial hub between the surrounding farms and the city of Feira de Santana.

Feira de Santana, 100 km away from Salvador, is the largest interior city of the northeast, with a population of over 600 000 people, and a major commercial, industrial and educational center with an important influence over the entire northeastern territory. Commerce is, since the city’s birth, the major impulse of its economy: Feira de Santana is the most important product distribution hub of the entire region.

Facts:
Architecture: Tiago do Vale Architects
Architecture team: Tiago do Vale, Camille Martin, Eva Amor, Karolina Zuba, Coraline Pothin, Riddhi Varma
Project year: 2017-2018
Program: Retail and Residential
Location: Anguera, Bahia, Brasil
Client: arilene Nery
Footprint: 990 ft2 (92 m2)
Construction area: 1980 ft2 (184 m2)    

Situated by the Arthur Vieira de Oliveira Plaza -Anguera’s identity center- this project responds to the transformation of an existing structure -already with a mixed commercial and residential use- that aims to clarify and separate those uses, qualifying the performance of both programs.

With a semi-arid tropical climate, it was important to provide a solution simultaneously strongly ventilated and with low thermal inertia.

Finally, it was also an important theme for the project to materialize it with local resources at a low cost and to tune it (both in its construction and in its communication) to the characteristics of the local manpower.

The result was the separation of both programs by floors, with the commerce taking the full ground floor and the residential program the entire top floor.

Considering the prevailing winds from north and northwest, a great permeability to the breeze was designed throughout the entire construction, controlling the moving air to achieve passive venting and cooling, fully regulating the system by opening or closing a single door per floor.

An interior patio functions both as a thermal chimney and as an indirect light source for both floors. Natural light is, in general, always filtered by cobogo panels, with the exception of the social space of the home, that established a direct and intense visual relationship with the Plaza.

Keeping the pre-existent structural elements, the new brickwork walls are raised with cement blocks and cement cogobo, both abundantly available at the local, painted in white. The use of plaster is limited to the regularization of the remaining pre-existent perimetrical walls.

To guarantee transparency, permeability and low cost several metallic mesh panels supported by tubular profiles are proposed as an alternative to the extensive use of glass.

Finally, the flooring is finished with white flattered cement.

In this crossing of highly specific local needs with a way of thinking architecture brought from a different continent, a project filled with unexpected stimuli was produced, of pragmatic richness and poetic simplicity.