SUMMARY Architects

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 (www.summary.pt), the youngest studio invited, was selected to present his work “infrastructure-structure-architecture” with the purpose of showing the concept behind his project Gomos System (vimeo.com/144377983).

The Biennale exhibits two infrastructural pieces and a Gomos System piece, so that we can get to know some elements that are part of its core. This installation also includes a table set with two screens that simultaneously play two videos made by Building Pictures. These videos are exclusive of the exhibition and they allow a comparison between the constructive process of the infrastructure as well as the constructive process of Gomos System itself (vimeo.com/168989733).

The project consists of a flexible and evolutionary constructive system based on concrete units. It’s a modular system in which each module comes completely ready from factory with all its finishes and equipments and it’s all assembled in loco. Thus it allows us to raise buildings in 3 months (3 days on site), within a period 6 times lower than Portugal’s building-rate average, without compromising its structural quality.

According to the architect, “it’s not about inventing, but about reinterpreting - we take a pre-existent constructive system often used in water drainage infrastructures and we transpose it to a habitable constructive system. In structural matters as well as constructive ones, Gomos System is identical to reinforced concrete water pipes”.