17 people, 1 goat, 3 horses and 3 pigs
This summer 2025, 13 participants from Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Indonesia, Portugal, Russia, the UK and the USA, joined us to participate in another installment of our Critical Concrete Social and Sustainable Architecture project, this time in the Meco Animal Sanctuary in Perafita near Porto. As usual, Laurane and myself, Samuel, rotated amongst the students and Gianluca was in charge of the mega precision team. We divided the work into three projects with different skills to learn. Gianluca leads a very precision and detail oriented dome construction, where each angle matters to the degree, and we believe that students still have nightmares about the 6mm step (was it 5mm?) between each triangle. You can’t possibly understand what I’m talking about, and that’s for your own good. The dome will be a pig paradise, and keep them covered during Porto’s long humid winters.
11 days of work, three construction projects, not fully designed in advance. Why would we engage in such madness? Because of Filipe and Xana. These long time friends of Critical Concrete (and former neighbours) run now, among other things, an adorable animal sanctuary, where they rescue every living creature they can. It all started with Rita, a 33 years old horse, that used to teach kids how to horse ride. Cute right? Very much so until you realise that all the horses we use (that is, horse riding, competition, police, carriage, you name it), get put down as soon as they start being a cost, even though they barely reached the middle of their lifespan. This is why Xana saved Rita. She used to work with her and couldn’t come together with the idea that she would be put down after so many years of being this enlightening presence with so many kids. So she bought Rita off. Then came Renata, then Cabaz. This start of an adventure opened a box of Pandora, and now Filipe and Xana have 3 joyful and cheeky pigs, Pepi the goat, a bunch of chickens, 19 cats and the occasional injured pigeon or duck. Clearly overwhelmed by this joyful family, the Meco sanctuary had many needs and we simply got carried away.
Laurane and Samuel coordinated the more funky and problem solving projects. Pepi, the dwarf goat, needs a home. She likes to be in height, like any good goat, and needs her hoofs to be dry as well. So we pre-designed, based on the students’ ideas, a two story goat house that will also offer a dry location for the horses’ hay. This project was kind of designed, but not fully, there are no bracings, no finishes, we just made sure we had enough wood for it. Students had the opportunity to build a structure that still offers some flexibility and room for improvisation. The precision level is more forgiving, than Luca’s crazy dome.
Finally, we offered the chance to have a full funk project: a horse bar. The horses meet in the middle of the land to eat, but this part is uncovered. Again, rain and wind are the enemy. But we had no proper plan. So the students that wanted were assigned a design-with-what-we-have project.
In this project, we used similar methodology as we are now used to, after 10 years (!!!) and so many workshops and postgraduations. We rotate, we listen to our students, make sure they learn what they’re excited about, give them a chance to design, and mentors build actively only when necessary (the typical last 2 days rush, ahhh! When will we learn!?). Else they do it all. We will not be fakely humble with the satisfaction we get from seeing an empowered Zorka, and this is just one example, controlling all power tools with ease and care after touching a power drill for the first time with us.
All the foundations of these works were done in tyre foundation (see that old article on our website) with used tyres from the local garage. They function perfectly for this purpose. We recycled the entire 33m2 metal roof structure from Filipe’s previous constructions that collapsed some years ago. We have a history of stealing extreme right advertisement banners and use them in our projects, where they can actually do something positive and serve as a water barrier, but the quantity we needed for this project made it impractical and almost risky to get so much from the street, so we luckily managed to get our hand on a dead stock of truck tarps and political banners, which contributed to the cyberpunk aesthetic of the whole project.
Like always, we like to complement these very hands-on projects with a solid theory background. After the couple of online co-design sessions we inherited from Covid times, we presented coffee lectures almost after every lunch, tackling among others natural insulation strategies, the dome design process, agroforestry concepts, two open mic lectures where the students presented their own projects and veganism&sustainability.
You know the joke right? How do you know that someone is vegan? Don’t worry they’ll tell you. Why did we talk about veganism again in our summer school, you might wonder? Because we can’t have a conversation about sustainability and ignore the single most impactful thing (yes more than flying) we can do for the environment, in this moment of dire crisis.
In this edition of our summer school, I (Samuel Kalika, founder of Critical Concrete) joined forces yet again with our longtime friends and partners Laurane Coornaert from Degre47 and Gianluca Stasi from CTRL+Z aka the King of Domes (hoping he will never read this) and Michelle Spångberg, from Greenbakes for the documentation and the delicious vegan food.
Critical Concrete is a Porto-based sustainable architecture initiative, organising workshops and postgraduations, now in its tenth year of building things that probably shouldn’t work but do. You want to join one of our adventure? Check the current deadline, we’re preparing for the postgraduation in sustainable architecture 2026/27.