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At the end of the south jetty of the port of Leixões, out in the Atlantic off Matosinhos in Porto, Luís Pedro Silva Arquitecto has coiled a white tiled cruise terminal around a sea sciences research centre.
The south jetty of the port of Leixões runs out into the Atlantic and then stops. Matosinhos sits 750 metres back across the water, Porto's Ribeira ten kilometres off by road or by river. At the end of that stone wall the port authority APDL, working with the University of Porto, wanted one building to do two jobs at once: move cruise passengers efficiently, and hand a piece of working port back to the city as ground the public could stand on.
What arrived in 2015 is a coil. The studio describes itself as enchanted by the jetty's curve, and the building answers it by winding: three arms reach out from a drum, and a fourth turns inward as a helical ramp around a core four storeys tall. The outer arms do the sorting. One carries the research level down toward the water, another delivers departing passengers to the cruise gangway, a third becomes the elevated walkway back toward the beach at Matosinhos.
The whole of it is tiled in white hexagonal ceramic, laid over surfaces that curve in two directions at once. From the sand the effect is a single wavy white mass with the weather moving across it. Up close it breaks into thousands of small faceted units, each catching the light at a slightly different angle, and the soffits under the ramps glow amber at low sun. "Closely the arches and its texture appeal to proximity, involve movements and the body, inviting the look and the touch," the studio writes.
Toward the jetty the building refuses to explain itself. It turns a blank tiled wall to the stone, no windows, nothing to read. The other faces open: a continuous glazed band under the drum, a lobby where the tiled underside of the ramp hangs overhead like a hull, and a roof that anyone can climb. Broad steps of pale stone rise in tiers toward a thin ribbon of railing, and at the top the horizon does the rest.
Inside, the sea and the land are kept on separate levels. Departure and arrival rooms and the marina facilities face the water; the Science and Technology Park of the Sea of the University of Porto, the event rooms, a restaurant and parking sit on the city side. So a passenger waiting for a ship shares a roof with people measuring what the ship is sailing through, which is a rarer arrangement than 17,500 square metres of terminal would suggest.
The work came in three stages. The quay and the main building were finished first; the last stage brought the street to the city, the marina, and the shallow pool set at the bottom of the atrium, a disc of blue held under the skylight. On the right afternoon there are musicians standing at its edge in traditional dress, playing to a room that was built to process luggage. The building is smaller than the ships it serves, and it seems entirely aware of that.
