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M-ODU is ambitious in scale and purpose.
Armed with architectural vision (for sustainability) with effective stakeholders (for financial longevity), the complex serves as a local catalyst for community inclusion around the arts, well-being, research, and leisure.

[This is part II of a two-article series on MEXT and M-ODU. Read the first part here.]

How to build cities’ future into better worlds?

The answer lies in squishy mud, on a rainy day in January, at the heart of the post-industrial plant of the Slaughterhouse, at the Campanhã district, in eastern Porto.

M-ODU is the brand name of one of the most ambitious cultural and service-based post-industrial regeneration projects in Porto, developed by Emerge – Mota Engil Real Estate. It is a polymorphic neo-urbanism project built as a community pilot where sustainability and connectivity form the alloy, weaving an architectural ensemble in what was a dormant enclave in which Porto’s slaughterhouse had once lived, some two decades ago.

The original Slaughterhouse architecture follows the German model, with the main building composed of several groups of buildings perpendicular to a main volume, creating a very monumental space with church-like spatiality made possible by reinforced concrete. Its regeneration draws an ambitious, generous, and elegant composition that preserves most of the grammar and choices of materials of its origins.

M-ODU, the concept, is 8 000 sqm dedicated to cultural and leisure facilities such as an art center, plus 12 000 sqm of service-based buildings, including a restaurant, a cafeteria, wellness center, and offices, at the heart of a long-neglected neighborhood in the eastern outskirts of Porto. The project connects industrial regeneration with bioarchitecture, wiring new forms of mostly pedestrian navigation with cultural experiences and human interactions.

The roof, a “large light levitating membrane”, is signed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, in partnership with the Porto-based studio OODA.

Kengo Kuma and OODA, who also collaborated for CAM, the Contemporary Art Museum at Lisbon's Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, identify as a "collaborative cultural ecosystem, built with and for people, which will promote the creation and presentation of artistic and cultural projects and programs of significant community and civic value, contributing to social cohesion and sustainable development".

A multidisciplinary and disruptive ecosystem, M-ODU pairs art with ecology and business. Green innovation and art-and-science synergies are the underlying matter of the space celebrating creativity and collaboration with the aim of fostering new forms of urban interactions next to real estate and economic developments across East Porto.

Ripples of successive visions

When Mota-Engil, the 2018 winner of a competition launched a year prior, expanded on the initial vision sparked in 2006 in Milan by Rui Moreira, mayor of Porto for three consecutive terms, the project shifted. It was more ambitious, "very different from others", according to commentators, and granted an international iconic architect.

Mayor Rui Moreira was instrumental in choosing the kind of regeneration of this Campanhã's former industrial site. Initially, a company specializing in logistics had claimed the space. He declined as his vision was to bring culture, social cohesion, and potential economic growth to a long-overlooked neighborhood.

Although the project was approved in 2018, it found itself oddly suspended for two years. Then came COVID-19, which prevented international team members from traveling.

Asian philosophies emphasize the precious, irreversible nature of time in time management, the importance of preparation, and the balance between speed and diligence. Perhaps the hiatus holding back the regeneration of the site until 2023 was a stroke of luck.

From concept to investment to activation, Emerge will act as an investor and manager for 30 years upon launch. The ready-made shell is now planned for delivery in August 2026. Within each structure, the choice of design and materials will be left to the companies and institutions settling in.

Bioarchitecture in a changing landscape of value systems

Bioarchitecture is the design approach that merges biological systems, ecological thinking, and built environments using materials that reduce harm, mimic nature, or integrate living processes, and applies tools that assess and optimize environmental performance.

The balance of how we interact with nature and how nature enters our living space is present throughout Kengo Kuma’s work.

Weaved in community interaction, in biophilic design, in the virtuous circle of regenerative design, most parts of the original buildings were preserved with added insulation placed outside and equipped with solar panels. The combination of the reinforced granite walls with the wooden ceiling turns the building seismic proof. Navigation and passages were reshaped as the new arteries, and the vertiginous ceiling height was preserved with double windowpanes and glass filters to mitigate climate variations.

All the many conscious choices generate a sustainable ecosystem. Sealed from urban traffic, the buildings welcome natural light. Trees work as chlorophyll diffusers to filter the traffic fumes from the adjacent arteries and the bridge linking each side of the nearby highway. In the main garden, the existing trees were preserved, and new ones were introduced, namely orange and lemon trees, which are typical of the surrounding neighborhood. These are commonly found in local courtyards and help create a ‘home-like’ atmosphere while enhancing the sensory experience through their fragrance. To build so near a large stadium and highway served as a testing ground for material resistance: in the original M-ODU project, the roof was designed using ceramic tiles. However, during the development of the project, the material was changed to perforated corrugated metal sheets due to the strong wind exposure in the area, which required a more permeable solution.

Circular economy principles are applied in many instances. A commitment was therefore made to safeguard key elements of the building complex, such as exterior wooden doors, iron stair railings, balconies, and windows, exterior gates and railings, decorative tiles, hydraulic mosaic interior flooring, wooden support eaves (”French hand”), and granite pediment featuring a coat of arms and carved rosettes. Some of these elements have been preserved and reintegrated into the complex, while others were carefully removed, catalogued, and stored within a materials bank of the municipality for future reuse. Each of these elements holds historical, material, and symbolic value. The resulting complex is pursuing LEED Gold certification.

The material intelligence embedded in M-ODU – from the insulation strategy to the reuse of structural granite – represents a philosophy that the company is now extending beyond the building site. As an associate of AlmaScience, the collaborative R&D lab specializing in sustainable functional materials and green electronics, MEXT is developing the next generation of what a project like M-ODU can contain: biodegradable sensors for structural monitoring, cellulose-based components that replace conventional electronics, and smart materials that track their own condition throughout a building's lifecycle. M-ODU demonstrates that construction can borrow from nature rather than extract from it. AlmaScience is where the science to do that at scale is being built.

The project is a testing ground for the convergence between stakeholders in infrastructure and green technology, architecture and design, urbanists and neuroscientists, crafting biophilic and sensory spaces for well-being and a new urban living.

"We are living in the era of the garden, not of the architecture", claims Kengo Kuma.

A cultural and corporate convergence

M-ODU will be a work and leisure destination with 40% of its space devoted to art and culture, and 60% dispatched to corporate entities. A large part of its dispatch will be hosting the offices and research center of MEXT.

Rui Silvestre, director of the cultural center, will oversee the Museum of Convergences, an extension of Porto's Municipal Gallery, hosting oriental art and the private collection Távora Sequeira Pinto, composed of over 1100 pieces of paintings and sculptures. The space will also integrate art residencies, community art practices, a performance space, with an integrated wellness space, a performance space, a restaurant, and a cafeteria.

The influence of the Portuguese in Asia will be at the core of this art ensemble.

Rui Oliveira Lopes, named the administrative director of the museum, holds a background in History and Art Sciences and has developed several research projects focusing on issues of transculturality and the visual narratives of Asian civilizations, with a special emphasis on religious contexts.

A strategic geography for inclusion and access

The regeneration project is biophilic in essence, circular in its approach to recycling, with community inclusion at its heart. The project exemplifies how native industrial plants can spark an entire neighborhood, serving simultaneously as cultural hubs, research centers, and economic catalysts.

The bioarchitecture embraces the speculative narrative of a sustainable future where the constructed world becomes the conductor of new thinking. The project is state-driven, corporate-based in investment and development, visionary and creative in blueprints, international and local in audience reach, and ideally located with immediate access to a versatile choice of public transport systems.

The pedestrian hyphen overlooking the freeway connects the stadium metro station (Estádio do Dragão) to the more middle-class neighborhood of Corujeira. As such, the project outlines a strategic geography, making it easy to hop on public transport or access the site by car. The schism with the Dragão Stadium and the Metro is now overcome by pedestrians with far-stretching views of the architecture and the valley.

The pathway offers transport by train, metro, and city buses, securing its future as a local, working, touristic, and artistic destination, easy to reach for all.

At the intersection of the Bairro do Cerco do Porto within the N12 ribbon, M-ODU looks at Bairro Costa Cabral (north), with Alameda Shopping and the Stadium do Dragão looking over its shoulders. Behind are the warehouses displaying the wholesale Mercado Abastecedor do Porto, a little brother to MARL for fresh produce and related goods.

Within a 30-minute walk, you can reach Porto TIC Campanhã, the interchange warehouse where transnational buses pick up and drop off passengers hourly. For art lovers based in Lisbon, this will be an inspiring day trip to be paired with the Serralves Foundation.

Kuma's architectural philosophy: nature and humans inside out

In Porto, Kuma's exhibition "Onomatopeia" at Casa da Arquitectura narrates his vision of built environments enmeshed in natural spaces, breathing into one another as a feedback loop. His architecture, made of flexible imprints and open circles, escapes traditional choreography. "Architecture exhibitions are usually one-sided, but here I want a cultural exchange between Portugal and Japan", he stated for e-flux.

M-ODU is where Kuma deploys his serpentine shapes and creative mantra of nature and humans inside out, once more demonstrating how human-made forms can mimic the dynamics of climate and the biosphere.

The half-covered roof – undulating translucent panels screwed solidly – plays with daylight, swinging softly along the wind, designing patches of shade along the staircase to the pedestrian bridge that gazes at the highway. The Komorebi effect that Kengo Kuma attains with this roof, simulating the light filtering through the trees, aims to mitigate the urban heat island effect and provide users and the general public with shaded outdoor areas where they can enjoy a comfortable and sheltered exterior space. At its epicenter, M-ODU brings humans and nature to the heart of the post-industrial, car-focused landscape, with virtual wings to fly beyond.

CAM echoes: Portuguese-Japanese vernacular design

The project, with its distinctive roof-panel signature, echoes Kuma's aerial armature of CAM (Centro de Arte Moderna), at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon; the 100m-long entrance canopy is based on the Japanese engawa. At M-ODU, the circulation of natural elements and the way they affect and nurture human navigation with pragmatism and poetry is undeniably his trademark and aesthetics, each time expressing into new shapes of design mastery. The canopy, made of clad in dark planks of ash covered by handmade white tiles, inspired by traditional Portuguese gardens, weaves Japanese and Portuguese vernaculars once more.

Behind the wheels of the giant infrastructure and construction challenge lies the excellence in building blocks, from vast infrastructures such as bridges, tunnels, and highways to the construction of innovative and sustainable developments and regeneration projects worldwide.

Mota-Engil MEXT: economic catalyst and community builder

The infrastructure is a case in point of sustainable innovation, its architectural pathways a model of inclusion. It is also designed to be an economic booster, with over one thousand people expected to be working on site daily. The cultural hub has been thought of as a sustainable business model for organic growth.

Set as an Oriental Porto Landmark, the space might swiftly turn into an economic opportunity, setting on stage a neglected neighborhood deprived of commerce and public space into the new real estate hot spot for housing, and commerce acquisition and development.

Hence, no fence will delimit the main entrance of M-ODU to the city itself, layering the art center softly into an open square at the center of the neighborhood. Its main arteries will be opened from 6 AM to 1 AM, hosting business services and encounters, hospitality offers, and outdoor relaxing pods, aside from the cultural offers.

Designed to weave together a buoyant cross-over of communities, the site aims to blend in entrepreneurs, guest and residency artists, operators of local and transient communities, restaurateurs and foodies, with accessible pathways that invite a blend of generations and lifestyles.

Could the project serve as a remastered urban pilot and regeneration flagship in sustainable living and innovation, through its roots and mandate of community builder? Isn't the goal here to favor well-being and inclusion beyond economic filters?

M-ODU works if a grandmother from Bairro do Cerco and a startup founder end up at the same table on a Tuesday afternoon – not because we planned it, but because the space made it inevitable. Our job in community management is to design the conditions for that encounter. The culture program, the residencies, the open square, the cafeteria – none of these are amenities. They are the architecture of belonging.

Mafalda Ferreira, Head of Community Management at M-ODU

MEXT: Mota-Engil Next: building Portugal's global infrastructure legacy

Founded in 1946 in the Portuguese city of Amarante, Mota-Engil has grown from a small family company into Portugal's construction leader with a consolidated position among the 30 largest European construction groups.

As Portugal's construction flagship, Mota-Engil is redefining what infrastructure means in the 21st century. The company has embedded sustainability and innovation into its strategic DNA, targeting reduced carbon emissions, renewable energy integration, and circular economy principles.

Through its MEXT innovation hub, Mota-Engil is pioneering new construction methodologies that reimagine how we design and build the cities of tomorrow – moving from concrete and steel alone to comprehensive solutions that prioritize environmental stewardship, social impact, and long-term resilience.

M-ODU is where MEXT's vision for sustainable infrastructure takes physical form. AlmaScience is the R&D ecosystem where the next generation of materials for projects like this is being developed. Discover the AlmaScience ecosystem.

Today, to think of the city implies connecting human spaces with the spaces of all other living forms, and with their material, energy, and information fluxes. What we used to call the city has morphed into an intensification of all processes on the surface of the earth. The city coexists with the technosphere, the novel geological paradigm whose rise marks the exit from the Holocene parameters of the Earth System.

John Palmesino, e-flux

[This is part II of a two-article series on MEXT and M-ODU. Read the first part here.]