Rehabilitation of the students union Office in ISCTE-IUL
The rehabilitation project for the student’s union office of ISCTE comes out from a careful
look of the original project for the building from the architect, Raul Hestnes Ferreira, characterized by wide cabinets and a secondary corridor. Three decades after the
conception of the building, the project site is now a group of small spaces, a result of
successive and irregular interventions made over the years and hard to live and work in.
Between the excess space partitioning remains a old spiral stairway, once used to access
the internal services of the library the used to work on the upper floor.
The project consists in the removal of the irregular walls from the previous interventions,
leaving a wide work space with relation to the exterior of the building and using his natural
light. To make use of the old stairway in order to make the space regular, a structure project
was necessary in order to reinforce the upper slab.
Two boxes are drawn in order to divide the main space, the get to be the office small warehouse, the president’s office and the kitchen that was already in the place, once used
as a photograph lab and making use of the natural ventilation. The boxes are made of light
materials and easy removal, one opaque and other translucent, allowing the natural light to
penetrate everywhere.
In the whole project the light acts like a conductive element. Throughout a glass wall of the
new proposed store, the public access corridor to the photocopy store is illuminated with
natural light in an unexpected way.
