Lisbon University's Faculty Of Sciences - C6 Building
The campus of the Faculty of Sciences consisted of a compact set of buildings restricting the landscape of the university area to a network of interstice roads and car parking, underlining its sideway situation to Lisbon and the Cidade Universitária.
Housing five different departments of the Faculty of Sciences, the C6 building creates a system of public spaces – a square, a boulevard and a patio – which redefine life on campus and its relationship with the city.
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The square is set up as a terreiro surrounded by galleries connecting atriums, auditoriums and the cafeteria, and overlooked by the teaching rooms located in the upper floors.
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The square is prolonged through the main atrium into a garden-patio, which opens westwards and is characterised by the presence of the main staircase.
The galleries surrounding the building open out onto the city, to the South, and accompany the boulevard eastwards along a lower wing, which contains the teaching and leisure spaces shared by all departments.
The boulevard, a tree lined gravel floored garden, lends structure to the whole campus, articulates the several new and old buildings and, through a system of walls, staircases and ramps requalifies the existing interstitial roadways as streets, acting as a suspended walkway.
The design sets up a system of wall profiles, on which variations are exploited in order to give scale to the public spaces they confine, whilst they organize internally the great diversity of spaces they contain. The building walls are made of smoothly coated and painted concrete, ending in sharp edges. The garden walls are made of sandy and white rough cast concrete.
The trees of the surrounding garden – oaks, pear-trees and an old eucalyptus, in the boulevard; zimbro bushes and a group of two oaks and an ash tree, in the patio; poplars and lotus enfolding the other façades – provide a counterpoint to the sharp presence of the C6 building.
José Neves, arquitecto
