Designer Gonçalo Prudêncio - G.pt furniture collection

We got in touch with the work of the designer Gonçalo Prudêncio after visiting the restaurant Adega dos Canários, located in Lisbon (Cais do Sodré). Designed by Ternullomelo Architects, this rehabilitation project gets its differentiation also through the furniture that presents: the chairs and tables collection designed by Gonçalo Prudêncio, which was named as G.pt.  We invited Gonçalo to send us his work to be published in our blog, being the result of this contact in today's post.

GPOD website
G.pt Facebook

We are available to publish the work from designers all over the world, especially in the situations when Design relates with Architecture. Please send your entries to david.cardoso@dimscale.com. Thank you!



G.pt from GPOD - Office for Design on Vimeo.

"G.pt is a furniture collection designed, manufactured and sold by GPOD | Gonçalo Prudêncio Office for Design.

It is inspired on what Indie represents within the music industry. By remaining independent it conquers the space for pure reflection, and for defining its own set of operating rules – aesthetically and otherwise. Its reflection, more than formal, is mostly about the social and economical aspects surrounding the design industry. It is aimed at understanding quality and the necessary mechanisms to achieve it, as well as how design products become part of everyone’s lives.

Being independent of any establishment, due to the intrinsic freedom to define the what-to-do, the why-doing-it and the how-to-do-it, with a fairly high level of risk control, makes it easier to address complex issues like sustainability or cultural identity, as well as other social issues surrounding the manufacture of utilitarian goods, in order to try out ideas that could then be applied on a bigger scale.

The collection G.pt is composed by a dining table, a family of stools and small tables, a system of sofa-side tables, a family of lamps, a dining chair, a double bed and a candle light holder, all produced in Portugal using national materials only."

- Gonçalo Prudêncio 

Enoturismo Herdade do Esporão (photo: Alexandre Delmar + João Messias)

Lounge The Lisbonaire (photo: Francisco Bahia Nogueira)

G.pt collection (photos: António Nascimento)

 Adega dos Canários (architecture by TernulloMelo Architects, photos by Maria Rita + Pedro Sadio)

Projects Wanted - Private House in Menorca, by Dom Arquitectura

"Private House in Menorca" is a housing project sent by Dom Arquitectura (from the architect Pablo Serrano Elorduy), a Spanish Architecture office located in Barcelona. With an area of 443 sqm this project was developed and built between the years of 2007 and 2009.

We are open to receive projects from all around the world, regardless of their dimension or typology. Please send us high quality photos (indicating their authors), drawings and descriptive texts in English to our Marketing e-mail - david.cardoso@dimscale.com. It will be our pleasure to help spreading new Architecture concepts and ideas.

"Being a summer house, the main idea is not only creating the interior spacesof the house, but distribute all outer space. The interior spaces seek goodrelations with the outside world, colonizing their surroundings and theirviews.

Inspired by the typical Menorca "tanca", stone walls divisions of the realm. The plot is organized from a space frame, fully passable, based on a traceorthogonal, combining floors, platforms, water, trees, plants, tanca,pergolas, walls and the house itself. By combining these elements we areencountering this approach in which each piece is delimited and acquires itsown identity and use within a harmonious whole. The diversity of outdoorstays provides the site a space balanced richness.

The house is situated in the center of the outer solar stays divided in two,front and rear. The hall of the house with two large openings on each sideoperates as a mixed external-internal transition. Falls outside the pavementcausing a passage that connects the back yard with the front porch.

Based on typical lattices "menorquinas" designed a sliding wooden slats fixedset a filter to the outside, they act as sunscreens, giving privacy andmultiplying the usability. They combine the vertical slats of the eastand west facades with horizontal south facade. Most of these openings arefloor to ceiling, allowing for greater continuity to the outside and makingthe most magnificent views of the site."

- Dom Arquitectura 

ground floor

first floor

Architecture References - Value Farm, by Thomas Chung

Value Farm

Shekou, Nanshan, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

Thomas Chung

Area: 8120 sqm

Year: 2013

Photos: Value Farm

Project's description on ARCHDAILY [by the architect]:
"Value Farm creates value by cultivating the land as a collective effort. The project intersects issues of urban transformation, architecture and urban agriculture with an international cultural event, and explores the possibilities of urban farming in the city and how that can integrate with community-building. It forms part of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013, within Ole Bouman’s Value Factory located at the Shekou Former Guangdong Glass Factory in Shenzhen, a site that is itself undergoing radical transformation. Responding to the Biennale’s theme of ‘Urban Border’ and Shekou’s post-industrial regeneration, Value Farm is realized as new architectural and landscape design providing permanent infrastructure for the site’s future as well as a substantial piece of performative, growing event-architecture throughout the biennale.

Design Concept
The design inspiration from Hong Kong is twofold. First is the trend of flourishing rooftop farms in the city’s dense urbanity. Besides creating a green oasis above the urban chaos, reconnecting city dwellers with nature and the therapeutic hands-on experience of growing crops, urban farming offers a more sustainable, secure, accessible food supply as well as pointing to an attitude, lifestyle change. Moreover, the use of hitherto untapped ‘artificial land resource’ (rooftops) in dense urban areas as productive terrain can improve the micro-climate, respond concretely to the contemporary ecological imperative beyond dressing up “sustainability” with energy-saving features and devices such as vertical greening.

Second is the lively urban vernacular of the Central district’s 170 year-old Graham Street wet market precinct, whose low-rise fabric embody the city’s fine-grain metamorphosis. The precinct is currently facing wholesale redevelopment and with it the potential eradication of the city’s self-evolving meshwork of spatio-cultural practices. Value Farm speculates retroactively turning rooftops of an entire demolished wet market block into farming terrain. Nature is excavated anew from Hong Kong’s urban past; rooftop configurations are taken as “new ground” to cultivate a viable post-urban future.  

The concept is transplanted onto a full-scale 2,100m2 open site within the factory premises as “test ground”. Brick enclosures are abstracted and compressed “rooftop farming plots” whose different heights allow varying soil depths for different crops. Original stair cores are converted into brick platforms and open pavilions to accommodate future activities. An irrigation pond collecting the site’s natural underground water source, an integrated sprinkler system, nursery as well as projection room and exhibition facilities are added. 

Re-valuing the Site
Instead of treating “landscape” as a passive, detached ‘view of the land’, Value Farm emphasizes curative transformation. The site’s existing qualities are revealed, features such as old walls and large trees redeemed and given new life, resources such as the natural underground water are gathered by digging a new irrigation pond, and simply decorating it with the large rocks uncovered by the excavation. Resonating with the Value Factory’s new production of ‘culture’ within the factory buildings for the Biennale, Value Farm reworks the site to produce “nature”, reviving the land’s fecundity. Invoking the analogy of the self-reliant convent lifestyle, the site is also conceptualized as an enclosed garden configured for farming and physical cultivation.

Transplanting post-urban values
Besides conceptual inspiration for Value Farm’s design, Hong Kong character, seeds and workforce are injected to realize a productive performance. Hybrid crops reflect Hong Kongers’ alternative and healthy taste, while addressing food safety and accessibility, urban sustainability and self-sufficiency. Apart from creating and maintaining the farm, major events such as Sowing, Tasting and Market Festivals are organised to nurture cross-border exchange engaging local citizens, community groups, professionals and visitors. Hong Kong’s post-urban value is demonstrated via producing green, food, smell and taste in an engaging and most unexpected way. 

While revalorizing disused industrial land in Shenzhen, Value Farm cultivates refreshing nourishment for all. With abundant local enthusiasm, well-supported by community groups and well-received by the media, there is every chance Value Farm can endure and convert the site permanently to continue producing new value for all. More importantly, it can serve as a test-bed for further propagations of such a performative ensemble of living, participatory, urban farming-event-architecture."

-  Thomas Chung