Three years ago, Pedra Liquida office (Liquid Stone) was commissioned to create a new Hotel design concept -Casa do Conto, Arts & Residence- giving life to a beautiful XIX Century Oporto House, through a chirurgical restoration process. Unfortunately, on March 2009, few days before the hotel opening, the building suffered a terrible fire.
The architects and concept creators decided that wthey had to rebuild it, better than before. In fact, recreating its remaining structure was an opportunity to make this new hotel, and the memory of that special house, reborn from the ashes, like the Phoenix.
In this sense, the new project evokes, through an abstract approach, the old house adornment and its wall textures by using traditional surfaces – crossed wood patterns, corrugated steel plates and curved plywood panels – as a “mould” for the new concrete walls: at the central staircase; at the back facade; at the cubic bathrooms inside every suite; at the oval-shaped central skylight, a typical Oporto typology. As a result they get a kind of “fossilized architecture” where those modern “skins” rephrase the pre-existing ones.
All the concrete ceilings are (re)decorated by carved texts, in bass-relief, where you can read different narratives about the concept of "house" and of that house in particular. Created by different authors related to Oporto and its architecture, those six tails were spatially layered by Pedra Liquida, and graphically imagined by R2 Designers.
Casa do Conto embodies a unique story of life, which is, in fact, the history of the city itself. The hotel highlights Oporto’s domestic architecture, solemn and vertical, carved by the scars of a time that mediates its decline and rebirth, the memory of the past and the desire for the future, the granite stone of the old facades and the new concrete of its inner core.
Pedra Liquida was created in 2006 by Alexandra Grande, Daniela Coutinho and Nuno Grande, and it is based at Oporto City Centre. Its main activity relates architectural design, engineering and building management. The office is structured by a strong teamwork, based on the dynamical contribution of different architects such as Joana Couceiro, Joao Crisostomo, Luis Sobral, Ivo Lapa and Gerson Rei.
Pedra Liquida aims to live and work for the city cultural consolidation, involving markedly the rehabilitation of urban buildings. Its main projects are related to house renovation (single and collective), new and creative residential and hotel concepts, exhibition design and curatorship.
Pedra Liquida was among the finalist offices of the 2008 FAD Prize, Barcelona, with the installation titled "VIP, Very Irregular Polyhydric Room", at Casa da Musica, Oporto; the office was also awarded with the 2nd Prize at the International Competition for the Rehabilitation of the Tram Museum in Oporto.