The project redefines an entire urban block in Porto, transforming the former military compound into a permeable extension of the public realm. What was once an enclosed and institutional structure becomes an open, lived space, where streets, courtyards, and gardens interconnect. Through the removal of the dividing road and the fragmentation of the original building into smaller volumes, the square extends into the block, establishing new continuities of movement and encounter. The result is a porous urban fabric that dissolves boundaries between public and private, civic and domestic — an architecture of openness that restores unity to the city’s centre.

Praça da República occupies a pivotal position within Porto’s urban fabric, a civic space layered with history and transformation. At its northern edge lies a military compound, commissioned in 1790 during the reign of Queen Maria I and completed in the early nineteenth century. The complex, defined by its disciplined geometry and restrained architecture, asserted a strong institutional presence overlooking the open expanse of the square.

In the historical engraving shown bellow, the two are still bound together, as the rhythm of the barracks anchors the expansive calm of the plaza. Over time, the road that now divides them fractured this unity, turning proximity into separation. The project seeks to repair that lost continuity, reweaving architecture and public space into a single urban gesture, and restoring the square’s original equilibrium between openness and enclosure, presence and void, allowing the city to flow once more through its heart.