Complex No. 2 —
Parque das Nações

Expo’98 created the opportunity to convert a polluted territory into a mixed-use urban expansion area, including generous assembly buildings and outdoor areas. Parque das Nações is a recognized success story, but it suffers the same limitations as other major urban conversions around the world: it has a generic built environment of dubious longevity.
Lot 3.22, between Avenida Fernando Pessoa and Hospital CUF Descobertas, allows erecting 13 storeys of housing on 4 storeys of hospitality, retail and parking. We recede the NW front to create a wide sidewalk, and place hospitality along this front. Retail occupies the SE front – the most accessible by car. Parking completes the volume, creating a green podium on which the housing rests. We concentrate its built mass on the NE and NW sides, thus opening the largest possible surface to the southern quadrant – with the best views and best solar orientation – and protecting the whole from prevailing winds from the northern quadrant. The remaining construction capacity is arranged in a slender tower, with no impact on views and insolation of the whole.
The shared circulation leans to the outside perimeter, thus allowing the apartments to open to the southern quadrant and the garden. The apartments – studios to 4-bedroom’s – are distributed according to their size: the smallest at the centre, on the lower floors, and the largest at the ends, on the upper floors. All apartments have balconies, which widen in front of the social spaces. Plans and façades follow a subdivision of a 6,0-metre structural span, suitable for the various parts that compose the complex. Design, materiality and construction are thought of as ingredients of a single sensual, robust and timeless gesture, which seeks to project what that Lisbon, by the Mar da Palha, and despite the vicissitudes of times, will always be.