90% of all ocean life can be found in shallow coastal waters, and almost half of all people live near these shores. The coast becomes a blurred corridor where celestial, geological, ecological, and anthropogenic rhythms correspond and resonate.

The port of Leixões is expanding; its interests are diverging from adjacent communities and ecologies. A planned terminal upgrade and breakwater extension will bring damaging pollution, habitat disruption, and a loss of coastal access. How can architecture look to dismantle the monologic nature of the port, generating dialogue between marine life, people, and coastal infrastructure?

In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin discusses monologic and dialogic authorship. The former holds a single point of view, while the latter is an interwoven flow of multiple voices, a polyphony. This project looks at the convergence of coastal voices, stitching them together through a language of monolithic spaces and fractal surfaces. Beneath the tide, benthic life is encrusting, sediment is accumulating – processes that the architecture makes visible and explorable.