ARCHITECTURAL IDEAS COMPETITION TO SELECT DESIGNERS FOR ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPING, FOUNDATIONS, STRUCTURES AND SPECIAL FEATURES, FOR THE NOVA SCHOOL OF BUSINESS & ECONOMICS – CARCAVELOS CAMPUS – CASCAIS
The intervention proposal for the outdoor spaces is based on four fundamental principles.
The first is related to the attempt to resolve a topographic system that allows exploration of the magnificent views and, at the same time, ensures a connection with the other side of the coastal road, connecting to the sea and re-establishing, in a certain way, a fundamental relationship to the site’s landscape. This topographic support ensures the articulation between several spaces, interior and exterior, made with an extensive fluidity, defining the spatial continuum of the ground.
The second principle aims to achieve the constitution of relatively autonomous spaces and can match formulations of programmatic character, allowing the construction of a whole exterior system and eventually establishing a kind of space catalogue of great personality and strong potential. Their use by students and teachers will be able to apply to an extensive list that involves spaces with a formal/informal character: spaces where people can lay down studying, sunbath or enjoy shaded areas, areas of clearings on the forest that enable various appropriations of space such as reciting poetry, theater, music, recreational events, places to date, etc.
The third principle seeks to work in every functional outdoor space, such as the access and distribution roads, the parking spaces or pathways and passage for maintenance services, emergency and safety, fused and integrated on a natural logic that structures the whole project. The enclosure and boundary of the Campus with the surrounding easily integrates this logic.
The last principle wants to achieve precisely this structuring logic of matrix and material continuity between the outdoor spaces and the large interior and central space that can stress the building’s structural ambiguity, so you cannot see clearly that several buildings are joined by a intermediation areas between the exterior space and the collective interior or a huge building that is placed in the exterior space.
Clearly, there are two intervention scales. In a more specific way there is a large-scale configuration and conformation of the various programs in the intervention area, and there is another intermediary or smaller scale that defines and supports an unifying basis inert matrix, of stone or concrete, based on a large game of joints and which operates as a crop principle that emerges the green, conforming many outdoor spaces. There is a material gradation of the large collective space essentially inert to the outer limits of the intervention area mainly green. This gradation can also be understood in logic of humanization and naturalization of the site.
The green structure is a vegetative association dominated by conifer species, with a tree and a shrub layer suitable to the soil and climatic conditions of the site, understood as a forest continuum and with different growing dynamics. The proposed species: Pinus pinea, Pinus pinaster, Pinus halepensis, Juniperus communis, Pistacia lentiscus, Rhamnus alaternos, Quercus coccifera create structures like a buffer, they also frame the views, create shade, deintensify the outside limits from the central area, reactivate the defragmented coastal ecosystem continuity. The proposal for the outdoor spaces must be understood not as a draft but rather as an implementation and growth strategy, associated with its own dynamics.
