We’ve seen a number of high profile global players showing off their radical interiors of late, Facebook and Google the most notable recently, but nothing could have prepared us for the outrageous exterior architecture of Vodafone Portugal’s sublime new residence in the country’s second city, Porto. Sensationally modern, the building was designed by the rather impressive Portuguese architects, ‘Barbosa e Guimaraes Arquitectos‘, and has been photographed here by the talented architectural photographer, Fernando Guerra. From the outside in, this truly unique office space twists, turns and often seems to perform the impossible with it’s formidable geometric lines. The sparse, industrial materials extend to the interiors and the challenging, uneven, angular lines are accentuated by recessed lighting that zig-zags around the communal spaces, offering a wonderfully chaotic edge to the building as a whole.
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João Martins
January 12th, 2010
The Vodafone building at Oporto has several references to Libeskind’s work, both outside and inside and, being further down the same avenue, it really looks like a “childish” marketing response to tha fact that one of its competitor’s (Optimus,a portuguese mobile phone player) has its flagship store at Rem Koolhas’ Casa da Música.
João Abrantes
January 14th, 2010
Actually, this building stands in the same avenue as the Casa da Música, by Rem Koolhaas. Josep Maria Montaner has called this “diffuse ecletisms”, influences that people absorb not even knowing what they are absorbing and why they are doing it.
The two buildings are 2 km away from each other (tops).
This Building, the Vodafone headquarters, behaves like it is on the same scale as Casa da Música, perhaps not recalling that, in fact, this is a private equipment and not a public one…
And, if you actually could see the area where the building is built, you would see that it simply doesn’t fit. It behaves like an alien, screaming for attention.
Of course the purpose of Vodafone was fulfilled, but surely the interests of the city of Porto itself weren’t…
This really looks no more than a totemic architecture, whose purpose is just to deliver “something new”, even if that something new isn’t that new in fact, and just some show-off by a private company. (the last two images are taken from spaces that no one that doesn’t work in Vodafone will be able to see…)
But of course, in the end, one can do nothing but be mesmerized with these photos and, what’s more, all the publicity the building gained will make it profitable…