Mercado dos Olivais
The market is the heart of a city. The essential public program, the most visible form of collective life. People come to trade. They talk. They watch. They are watched. It is not only a place to buy or sell - it is a place to live among others.
Therefore, we couldn’t think of the building only in terms of function. Of course, it has to work. It has to stand up, hold weight, deal with drainage and airflow and all of that. But that is too short-sighted. A public market cannot be thought of as a building, but as part of the street, part of the city, part of the life moving through it.
We thought of the outside as much as the inside. So we gave it a roof, a thirty-meter-long roof, sheltering a quiosque, like the ones found across Lisbon. A small place, simple. But it means something: it means you don’t have to buy to belong. You can just be there. You can sit, have a coffee, or read the newspaper. A place not to shop, but to linger, to watch, to waste time - one of the last civic freedoms.
This space had not been requested. No one had written it down in the initial brief. But it seemed to us an essential part of such a building.
There shouldn’t really be an inside and an outside in a market, rather, sheltered areas and non-sheltered areas. We tried to erase that boundary. Not with grand gestures, but with prosaic repetition. The small shops align along the perimeter and open both ways, with the same façade, the same look. Facing in. Facing out. You can’t really tell if you are in the market or just on the street. A façade made of equal faces, indistinguishable from one another, with intentional ambiguity.
And then there is the hall, the main space. Brutal, pragmatic, loud, wet, chaotic. People shouting. Fish blood on the floor. Raw life in an organized box.
In a market, we find the human condition. Not abstracted. Not theorized. Not spoken about at a panel. But lived noisily, publicly, unapologetically. Perhaps the only place left in the city where people still look at each other and say something as trivial, but as profound, as Bom dia, senhor/a.
Location
Type
Team
Elói Gonçalves
António Mesquita
Mariana Fonseca
Haritsya Putri
José Guerra
Naeun Kwon
Otto Mattsson
Client
SRU - Sociedade de Reabilitação Urbana
landscape
Baum
structure
nucleo engenharia
signage
dobra