Carandá: A New Ruin

Catarina C Kohut on Eduardo Souto de Moura’s market hall in Braga, Portugal

It is a rare event for architects to outlive their work. It is equally uncommon when they are involved in its rehabilitation process through radical programmatic change. Eduardo Souto de Moura lived through both, in the period of 20 years that followed the design and construction of the Municipal Market of Carandá in Braga, Portugal.

Souto de Moura was 28 years old and a fresh graduate when, in 1980, he was appointed to design a new market for the city of Braga.

Research on the building’s ideal typology took him to the Greek stoa - the genesis of public gathering, and from the plot, he took advice from its pre-existence. The result was a covered street that followed an existing path, to link a former farmhouse with the city.

Souto de Moura would later reminisce: “That was the only possible place. A walled farm in the middle of the city. At the centre of the plot, a hill. On its top, a house. The meeting point of two roads – orthogonal axis of land that connected the house with the city. If the meeting point was there, in the house, the market had to be there. If the path was straight, the market would be straight and levelled between two supporting walls. On the outside little was changed. Inside, it is just a matter of choosing a path between the pillars.”

Programmatically, the long flat roof covered two very distinct spaces. A two-storey back-of-house box for all the market’s amenities contrasted with a single, large and open double-height space. Flanked by columns, the market hall organized itself around a central linear worktop. Breaking the purity of this Miesian plan, three new, but ruin-like, stone walls were introduced, employing stones recovered from the site and invoking the memory of a place that no longer exists. This would be a motif that would become recurrent in the work of Souto de Moura; he had seen his mentor Siza doing it so it makes sense that he incorporated this into his way of thinking about new buildings.

There are many reasons for the market’s short life but, by the late 90’s, what was designed to be a loud and busy place was already a disused hall. In his various visits to the building, Souto de Moura noted that despite the sad reality, the building at least kept its use as a pedestrian connection between two points of the city. Confronted with what the future might be, Souto de Moura supported the idea of demolishing the building, preferring that to the slow death of an obsolete structure.

It was probably a surprise to him when, instead, the city of Braga decided to appoint him to convert the area into a new ‘cultural centre’ for the city. This two-phased project saw the conversion of the market hall into a public garden and a dance academy between 1997 and 2001 and a school of music replacing the market’s supporting building from 2004 to 2010.

The street aspect of the market was retained and so were most of its stone walls. The dance academy hid itself from the public garden using the old fish stand as a façade and the school of music replicated its former building becoming a larger box inside its original perimeter walls. Throughout, structural elements, like columns and staircases, were left as freestanding objects; the remains of a failed modern-day Agora.

His original market building was now the new ruin, one that Souto de Moura naturally embraced as an important testimony to the site’s history; “When twenty years ago, I designed the market, the idea was to build a covered street, a city fragment capable of proposing an urban grid. This grid happened excessively, and the market suffocated between schools, nightclubs and a rampant speculation.

Throughout the years and after several visits to the ruin, I understood that the market was being used as a bridge, as a street, a necessary connection between two city axes. In this project I propose to remove the roofing, to design a garden, a street and to build a “cultural” program on the little that still remains.”

NOTES

Published 19th March 2021

Photographs via Arquitectura Viva and Metalocus.

Catarina C Kohut is an Architect and an Associate at Tuckey Design Studio.