CASA BRANCA joint carpentry

a community workshop

Alentejo, Portugal

In cooperation with the initiative ‘Estação Cooperativa’, eleven BASEhabitat students are working in a small town in the Alentejo to set up a community run carpentry workshop. This is a small but important step for future renovation work in the village, as it will create a place to put donated machines from a former craft school into operation.

A dilapidated administration building with a collapsed roof was therefore gutted and refurbished in spring 2024. In order to achieve wider spans easily and with reduced weight, the new, rear-ventilated roof was constructed with timber board trusses in narrow cross-sections. Their load is transferred to separate wooden supports like a house within a house, independently from the existing walls. In addition to the renovation of the façade openings, a low-temperature field firing was also experimented with to remove organic material from the old roof tiles.