Innovation Hub

Description

Dealing with a constructed heritage, this project begins by focusing on understanding that construction. A former primary school from Plano dos Centenários fully complied with the guidelines of this mass building campaign: a flat plot of land measuring approximately 1500m2, laid out in a south-north orientation, symmetrical and modular construction, with access from the south façade marked by the presence of nationalist iconography over the entrance doors and modest porches to the north directly related to the playground.

Associated with a long lineage of Portuguese architecture, which extends back to the architect Raul Lino and his considerations on the Portuguese House and the school building as a typology, this complex was intervened at the beginning of the millennium with the construction of a northern body that distorts the entire logic of its implementation, transferring the entrances from the southern limit of the land to its eastern vertex.

This access, which we should maintain, presents us with a lateral façade that makes it difficult to read and understand the whole. It is proposed to extend the building on this location through the construction of a corner building, monolithically composed of a single material. This option aims to offer the complex the virtues found in the original building: functional clarity and nobility of its constructive character.

In conjunction with the redesign of the public space, pedestrian access will now be via a new axis delimited by the two buildings. This space culminates in an opening of the boundary wall that reveals the landscape, allowing a new reading of the complex, its relations with the surroundings and hypothetical new connections that it can offer to the community.

Inside the buildings, in addition to the compartmentalization required by the new program and the necessary adaptations to meet the most diverse contemporary demands, an attempt was made to adopt a common language based on the reproduction of a previously existing wainscoting. This simple gesture, anchored in the collective memories of pre-existence, offers unity to the three distinct buildings. The possibility of an independent reading of the various construction campaigns of the set is thus maintained, now aided by the presence of a decoder building, who assumes his time without failing to respect the previous epochs.