In the 15th edition of the Venice Biennale, Alejandro Aravena invited us to look at new fields of action, projects that intend to improve life quality and stories of success that are worth getting to know. Thus, Samuel Gonçalves, founder of the SUMMARY studio, the youngest studio invited, was selected to present the work “infrastructure-structure-architecture” with the purpose of showing the concept behind his projectGomos System.
The Biennale exhibited two infrastructural pieces (common sewer pipes) and one Gomos System module, side by side, so that we can get to know the elements on the genesis of this building system, as well as its concept’s sequence and logic – “from the infrastructure for basic services to the structure of open architecture”. This installation also included two videos (by Building Pictures), portraying a direct comparison between the construction process of the infrastructural piecesand the GomosSystem piece itself – thus attesting the similarities between them both.
TheGomos System project consists of a modular, flexible and evolutionary constructive system, based on concrete prefab units. Each module leaves the factory completely ready,including all the neededinterior and exterior claddings and finishes,insulations, water and electricity installations and even equipments and fixed furniture.After transportation, the building’s assembly is simply made by connecting each module,in loco. This processallowsus to raise buildings in 3 months (3 days on site), within a period 5 times faster than Portugal’s building-rate average. This entirely industrialised process leads to an optimization of the time spent in production and in construction site, without compromising the building’s structural quality.
The modules’ design and dimensions, which were planned in order to optimize the transportation and assembly processes, allow an adaptation of this system to different types of program and topography.
This project is not about inventing, but about reinterpreting - we took a pre-existent constructive system often used in water drainage infrastructures and we transposed it into a habitable constructive system. In structural matters as well as constructive ones, the Gomos System is in all identical to reinforced concrete water pipes.
