Landscape of learning: this dramatic addition to a Lisbon campus makes a powerful formal statement

Architectural Review, The, July, 2004 by Timothy Brittain-Catlin

Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus are brothers who graduated in consecutive years from the architecture faculty of Lisbon's Technical University in the late 1980s. Both worked with Goncalo Byrne before establishing their own practice while still in their midtwenties. Their international reputation was established with student halls of residence in Coimbra, which were highly commended in the AR's Emerging Architecture Awards (AR December 2000). That building comprised a slab-like tower with two quite different faces at the corner of the site, and this motif characterizes their next substantial academic project, the Rector's Office at the New University of Lisbon. This institution is the capital's third state university, and was founded in 1973. Since then, a new campus has been established north-east of Campolide, a residential suburb in western Lisbon. The area was originally something of a dead-end, trapped by a maze of railway and motorway arteries, and identified architecturally primarily by the massive castellated city penitentiary of 1867 with its six radiating cellblocks. A slightly less daunting local monument is the Jesuitical college, built at much the same time and now occupied by the university's economics faculty. Restored in 1999, this 35-bay, three-storey building established the overall envelope for the Aires Mateus scheme. Like other recent buildings on the site, the new office is aligned orthogonally with it (in this case to the north), and the height of the new tower corresponds to that of the top of the old building uphill from it.

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The Rector's Office provides accommodation for a large number of administrative functions, which are placed in regular enclosed offices along the south-west face of the tower and reached by a single-loaded corridor. The other long face of the tower houses some services and staircases, and externally is entirely blank. Cladding is a very pale limestone. The podium building is crafted into a platform reached (from nowhere much, at the moment) by a monumental flight of steps running across its full width, more than 40m. In all cases, the fenestration has an illusory quality to it. The great north end of the tower is uniformly glazed to suggest that it lights principal rooms, though in fact closer inspection reveals regular office units, a corridor end, and a lift shaft. The long face over the podium, lighting the offices, is perforated by elongated, horizontal openings in a complex irregular rhythm that corresponds neither to storey height nor room plan divisions. The podium itself, containing the greatest of the public spaces both inside and out of an auditorium, is pierced by nothing more than occasional and modest light shafts.

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Some of the devices used here are immediately familiar to those who know Lisbon's recent architecture. The great hooded tower end--essentially a circulation space wrapped in thin masonry--first appears to be a gigantic version of the courtyard staircase intervention made ten years ago by Jean-Michel Wilmotte at the Museum of Contemporary Art in the city's Chiado district as part of a scheme for linking various historical buildings. Because of the alignment of heights, the end face of the tower makes a not dissimilar link between old and new. Moreover, the horizontal slicing of the windows has a close kinship with the walls of neighbouring student residences to the west of the Rector's Office, designed by Manuel Tainha in 1997.

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In the case of the Tainha building, however, the slits light stairwells along the rear wall, whereas here they create the principal elevation. That difference says much about the approach of the brothers, whose work has been seen as providing a dialogue between the major interior spaces of a building and the envelope that surrounds it. The Rector's Office was perhaps their first project to investigate this idea on a large scale, and there is indeed a looseness to the fit of the external envelope in relation to the functions within. The auditorium and the various enclosures within the podium block are detached both from each other and also from the podium's external walls, and the quality of the public space in between is derived from this sense of floating between objects, enhanced further by staircases which rise discreetly from below. Furthermore, the masonry of the tower is in effect a loose sheath draped around the offices, hanging open at the north end.

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Since designing the Rector's Office, Aires Mateus have taken these ideas almost to extremesin particular, in their house at Alenquer, which places a new house irregularly within the walls of two old ones. But this monumental earlier work has already provided a remarkable sequel to their initial campus triumph at Coimbra.

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Architect

Aires Mateus, Lisbon

Project team