The urban project of Lisbon tends towards precise interventions, through projects of an architectural scale, that have as objective to galvanize the surrounding urban situation. The aim of the competition is to conceive a Community and Interpretive Centre. The project should also consider the metropolitan dimension, specific to the future condition of the site. In this sense, the project must have the ability to create a strong urban intensity through its architectural language.

The centre, of approximately three thousand square meters (3000m²), must explore the assembly of spatial necessities of different scales and functions. The scale of the community is transposed into one clear span space allowing the organization of concerts, theatre and dance shows, film screenings, and gatherings for at least five hundred (500) people. The collective scale is represented through working spaces like classrooms and workshops, associated to the exhibition and conviviality areas, such as a restaurant and a coffee shop. The project must also take into account a domestic dimension, and dedicate a special attention to the human scale. All the logistics of such a program must also be clearly thought.

The outside spaces of the site must seek an interaction with the built project, in order to become areas that embody an intensity of functions in the same way as the inside use of the cultural centre. Such as the description of constructive rationality as an organic system, where all the parts are interdependent one from another, the assembly of the different entities of the program should be thought in the same way. The functions of the building, existing on different scales one with each other, suggest a dense construction. The project will interrogate how each function can support the other function.

Reference documentation available soon in the download area

The exhibition expresses a point of view on the condition of constructive rationality. On one hand it takes the form of a classification of the different student proposals, in a way to analyse and compare the projects. This is made possible by the fact that only the worm’s-eye axonometric view all in the same scale will be exhibited. This process allows the exhibition to be inscribed in continuity with the history of architectural treatises, which in the way of “Le Grand Durand”, proposes a reading by classification. The regime of anonymity will be lifted for the selected projects.

On the other hand, the exhibition includes works by architects that represent a genealogy of constructive rationality since the 16th century to today. This allows the levelling of all the buildings from different periods and addressing a contemporary point of view – a dynamic reading on the past looked through the field of reason. Furthermore, it highlights the possibility to create singular and unexpected solutions.

The student projects exhibited will be selected by the exhibition curators and can differ from prized projects selected by the jury.

The exhibition will be held at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale headquarters, which will be inaugurated October 2019. The possibility of a subsequent itinerancy of the exhibition is reasserted, if so the authors will be timely informed by email.

This international competition is open to all master students of architecture schools. Students can participate individually or in a group. Each member of a group must be enrolled in a master of an architecture school. Students with personal or professional connections with jury members can’t participate.