PUBLIC BUILDINGS

MARTEC RESEARCH CENTRE IN AÇORES

Açores . 2022

Design year
2022
Construction year
2024 - 2026
Location
Cidade da Horta, Ilha do Faial, Açores, Portugal
Team
Jorge Sousa Santos, Nuno Rosado, Francisco Ferreira
Engineering
WA-EC Luís Elvas, Marcelino Lopes, Ricardo Chibeles, José Gonçalves
Client
Região Autónoma dos Açores - Secretaria Regional do Mar e das Pescas

Gallery

About the project

MARTEC is an experimental Research and Development centre focused on marine studies, located on the site of the former fish-canning factory on Faial Island in the Azores. The complex is composed of three autonomous buildings, occupying an area of approximately 10,000 m².

The buildings are organised as distinct entities, defined by their direct relationship with the site’s topography and with the physical presence of the former industrial structures. The coherence of the ensemble does not rely on formal uniformity, but on the articulation between volumes, scales and siting.

The administrative building, which accommodates the workspaces, is conceived as a prismatic volume defined by a reinforced-concrete exoskeleton and a recessed curtain wall, establishing a direct visual relationship with the Atlantic Ocean.

The building supporting robotic systems and research vessels takes the form of a series of halls with pitched roofs, clad in solid black brick. Its morphology explicitly references the former factory sheds that structured this stretch of Faial’s landscape for decades.

The aquaculture centre is configured as a wall-building, set against the steep slope that defines the northern boundary of the site, operating simultaneously as a built limit and a programmatic support.

The relative scale of these three components allows for an almost urban articulation between them, forming two exterior plazas that establish differentiated relationships with the dominant landscape — the Atlantic Ocean.