Outeiro – Lugar Comum proposes cooperative housing as a spatial framework for shared life rather than a conventional aggregation of apartments. Set on a heterogeneous site in Maia, Portugal, the project organizes two timber volumes around a large southwest-facing courtyard and a permeable ground plane shaped by gardens, circulation galleries, and collective support spaces. Its architectural argument lies in the way circulation, landscape, and structure are fused into a housing model in which domestic life extends outward into common territory.
Outeiro – Lugar Comum Technical Information
- ArchitectsLivre Atelier, p20 studio, pema studio
- LocationMaia, Portugal
- Gross Area6,640 m2 | 71,473 Sq. Ft.
- Competition Year2025
- Photographs© livre atelier + pema studio
The proposal seeks to bring the home closer to the outside environment and to encourage a sense of community through everyday proximity and interaction between residents.
– Daniel Carvalho, Nuno Pinto e Costa, Tiago Pedrosa Martins
Housing as Collective Infrastructure
At the center of the project is a shift in how multifamily housing is defined. Rather than treating dwelling as a stack of private units served by neutral circulation, Outeiro – Lugar Comum distributes domestic life across a wider field of shared spaces. A large courtyard, oriented primarily to the southwest, becomes the principal social and climatic organizer of the scheme. This open void is not residual space left over after the buildings are placed. It is the project’s primary spatial room, giving form to a cooperative model in which common use is structurally embedded in the plan.
The ground level extends this logic by accommodating gardens, allotments, coworking areas, bicycle parking, and support spaces tied to daily maintenance and collective use. These functions push the project beyond the narrow limits of housing provision and recast the site as a piece of social infrastructure. The presence of agricultural support areas and community gardens is particularly significant because it connects shared life to routine forms of labor, care, and stewardship. In this sense, the project does not represent the community symbolically. It organizes conditions for repeated encounter through a network of practical spaces.
The architectural value of this approach lies in its attention to thresholds. Shared life is located not only in designated communal rooms but in transitions between units, the gallery, the courtyard, and the garden. By privileging these intermediate zones, the scheme suggests that collectivity is sustained through proximity, visibility, and overlapping patterns of use. It is a housing model in which the distance between the domestic interior and the communal exterior is deliberately reduced.
Site Logic, Urban Edges, and Spatial Permeability
The project takes shape as two elongated volumes calibrated to the plot geometry and to the irregular conditions of the surrounding urban fabric. Maia’s context here is neither uniform nor strongly ordered. Mixed scales, different building types, and inconsistent edge conditions produce a fragmented environment. Rather than imposing a singular object form, the scheme works through alignment, displacement, and sectional adjustment. The result is a pair of buildings that register the site’s morphology while establishing a more coherent spatial field.
A decisive move occurs where the two volumes are separated in response to the high-voltage line crossing the plot. What might have remained a technical constraint is transformed into one of the project’s strongest spatial conditions. The interruption generates a covered passage and a perceptible opening through the development, allowing continuity between exterior areas at ground level. In the rendered view, the underside of the timber structure frames this gap as an inhabitable threshold rather than a leftover service corridor. Permeability here is both literal and urban, allowing movement, sightlines, and shared space to pass through the ensemble.
Equally important is the refusal to establish a simple front-and-back. The project addresses its surrounding streets through different degrees of openness and enclosure. One side is shaped by galleries and views toward the communal green space, while the other is more compact, with tall openings set into a timber wall above a rough stone boundary. This differentiated edge treatment allows the housing to engage the adjacent public space without flattening the site’s complexity. The varying heights of the volumes also mediate between footprint and presence, preserving significant permeable ground while avoiding an excessively horizontal spread.
Exterior Galleries as Social and Architectural Device
The exterior gallery system is the most legible architectural element of the proposal because it merges circulation, collective space, and facade composition into a single device. Access to the apartments is via open-air walkways that serve as more than corridors. Their depth allows for plants, furniture, pause, and casual occupation, turning movement into a social condition. The gallery is therefore both infrastructural and domestic, a shared terrace from which residents encounter one another and overlook the common landscape below.
Diagonal stair runs intensify this condition by making circulation visible across the elevation. Rather than concealing vertical access within enclosed cores, the project externalizes movement and distributes it along the facade. This produces a clear rhythm in the timber frame and gives the building a sense of active inhabitation. The stairs also break down the scale of the long blocks, introducing a repeated diagonal counterpoint to the structural grid. In elevation, circulation becomes a public narrative of use rather than a hidden technical necessity.
The apartment plans support this strategy through a disciplined internal organization. Kitchens, bathrooms, and storage are consolidated into a fixed service spine, while living rooms and bedrooms are arranged more flexibly around it. This allows each unit to open directly onto the gallery, strengthening the connection between the private dwelling and the shared exterior space. The result is a residential type with a thickened threshold. Entry is not from an internal corridor cut off from climate and view, but from an inhabited outdoor layer that mediates between domestic interior and collective life.
Timber Construction, Material Atmosphere, and Environmental Approach
The use of cross-laminated timber gives the project a structural and material coherence that is evident across facades, galleries, and covered passage spaces. Timber is not applied as a finish over another construction logic. It organizes the tectonic order of columns, slabs, walls, and soffits, producing a direct relation between structure and architectural expression. In the visual material, exposed timber surfaces create a consistent material atmosphere, especially in the galleries, where the ceiling, floor, and wall planes read as part of a single continuous assembly.
This consistency matters because it reinforces the gallery and courtyard as extensions of the domestic realm. The warm, unfinished appearance of the timber gives these spaces a degree of intimacy without completely domesticating them. At the same time, the facades are disciplined rather than picturesque. The street elevation is more closed and punctuated, while the communal side opens into a repetitive structural frame. The project, therefore, uses timber to articulate different urban and social conditions, not simply to unify the building visually.
The environmental approach extends beyond the choice of construction system. Permeable ground is preserved as a central design priority, with informal paths, meadow planting, gardens, and retained trees shaping the open areas. Green roofs contribute to this landscape strategy by returning vegetated surface to the site and softening the building’s upper profile. Sustainability is understood here in spatial as well as technical terms. The combination of compact collective housing, low-impact construction, outdoor shared amenities, and ecological ground treatment suggests a model in which environmental responsibility is inseparable from social form.
About Livre Atelier, p20 studio, and Pema studio
Livre Atelier, p20 studio, and Pema studio are Portuguese architecture studios based in Portugal. Outeiro – Lugar Comum is a collaborative, competition-winning proposal by the three studios for Maia, Portugal, developed through an approach that combines cooperative housing, shared outdoor space, spatial permeability, and CLT construction to extend domestic life into collective territory.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Nucleo Engenharia
- Lead Architects: Daniel Carvalho, Nuno Pinto e Costa, Tiago Pedrosa Martins
