Panel cladding LOIOS BUILDING

in wood fiberFSC certifiedsmooth

The Oporto-based OODA Architectural Design Studio, run by architects Diogo Brito, Rodrigo Villas-Boas and Francisco Lencastre, has renovated a 19th-century building in the centre of Oporto, Portugal. The Loios Building contains 16 studio flats on five storeys above the ground floor, which is earmarked for shops. Each flat contains an innovative modular structure created by OODA with the aim of maximizing and optimizing space, and which contains all of the facilities needed for a fully functioning home, such as a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, study and storeroom. The modules have been made using a light-steel skeletal structure, fibreglass panels and Viroc wood-cement panels inside, and they are clad entirely in black Valchromat panels. Diogo Brito says that the Valchromat was easy to drill. This technique “enables designs to be embedded into the panels, but it also provides the modules with a degree of transparency, so that they function like large chandeliers for the rest of the flat at night”.