Os novos Apartamentos velhos

The building Armenia, from the architect Ari Canarim, was designed in 1955. At the time the first modern residential buildings in Porto Alegre were being built, located downtown of nearby. Modern, in that case, are tall buildings, of independent structure of concrete, covered with with pastilles and big glass plans. The Armenia has 14 floors with two different apartments in each, of 130 square meters, approximately, distributed in living room, dining room, three bedrooms, a bathroom, laundry, service bedroom and bathroom, in a plant that can be considered compartmentalized. The first inhabitants were rich people from the countryside, mostly, that used the apartment as a base for sporadic visits to the capital. Today, more than 50 years have passed, the building still has few original inhabitants, but in those three units that had recentry changed the owners it is possible to notice some coincidences. Two of them were bought by architects. Of the three, one is occupied by a single person; the other one by a couple without children and the third one by a mother with two itinerant children, typical of the contemporary divorces. The average, then, is of two inhabitants by apartment, which means, 65 square meters per person. This it is not a phenomenon restricted to the Armenia, exclusively; some of the buildings located downtown and on the outskirts of the city are receiving an injection of new blood. And from the same blood type, because if it is true that several of these buildings have some special characteristic, such as the Sulacap, the Santa Cruz, the Armênia, the Linck and the Santa Tecla, it is also necessary to have some special education or sensibility for perceiving the probable advantages of living in an old apartment, where it is difficult to arrange parking spaces, where the plumbing and the spinning are aged, besides the general corrosion of age. But there are the compensations, like the cost x benefit relation, when it comes to the private area; the location, usually central, in areas that today are mixed, and offer commerce as much as service; the security of busy areas associated to the comfort of entrances that are protected 24 hours a day; the brightness of the glass plans and beautiful views, which are possible in higher buildings, even more if they are on top of the city hills, which correspond to a great part of the central area, on Independêcia Street and in Moinhos de Vento. All that supported by the armed concrete, which enables the necessary adaptations of program. The only limit is the external envelope.