The Centipede is a Tea House in the Basílio Teles Garden, located in Matosinhos, the city where Álvaro Siza was born, in the North of Portugal. The garden stands in front of the beautiful City Hall building, designed by Arch. Alcino Soutinho in the late 80’s. This, once, romantic garden of the ninetieth century is now the sum of continuous interventions with poor architectonic quality and obsolete urban equipment.

 All Photographs by Leonardo Finotti

When approaching the project, the first thing that came to mind was to recover the original garden design and demolish all the equipment that had been built in the last decades. That proposal was not approved by the city administration and the intention they had of making a building in the garden persisted. 

Netherland based Next Architects had the tedious task of integrating a bridge transporting motor-vehicle traffic through the ecological zone of the Glanerbeek.




The focus was the preservation of the continuity for both the green landscape and the flow of vehicular circulation. Above the brook the bridge transforms according to visual and ecological demands, with a creative use of building material that helped the bridge to blend in.

Rios Clementi Hale Studios is a Los Angeles-based architecture, landscape, and urban design firm. Recently, it won two honors from the American Society of Landscape Architects, Southern California chapter, at the 2007 Quality for Life Design Awards. 

The firm garnered the Institutional Design Honor Award for “The California Endowment Campus Landscape,” and the Communications Design Honor Award for its creation of the “Civic Park Workshop Toolkits.”