East Lisbon Hospital
The East Lisbon Hospital is one of the most important public buildings/spaces in the east of Lisbon. This exposure is not only due to its architectural dimension, but also its importance as an essential facility in the city’s development. One can add the symbolic importance of a building that physically represents an innovative idea relative to the optimisation of public health services and the association between the public and private sectors to carry through an ambitious design of great long-term complexity.
The solution found sought to integrate a new building into the urban environment, allowing for green “intrusion” and permanent interaction with the landscape and providing a set of treated complementary spaces. Moreover, the considerable surrounding area will contribute to this framework and improved quality of the landscape and spaces for public use provided by this solution.
The exterior image reflect a modern style with clean lines and contemporary solutions in terms of materiality, using glass surfaces over the whole floor height, with opaque elements of identical sizes, resulting in a balanced composition of volumes and window openings. In order to introduce an element of dematerialisation of scale and movement to the buildings, we conceived a system of differentiated façades between the base and the elevated bodies, with white concrete elements on the upper floors, that provide the necessary light protection to the windows, and, at the same time, create an seeming broken-up texture which makes it difficult to identify the windows and floors, thus dematerialising the vertical reading of the built mass.
To ensure a complete versatility of the buildings, they were given a modular conception that ensures fundamental flexibility for the different areas and functional spaces. In the proposed architectural solution, the East Lisbon Hospital, as a living building, showed its capacity to face new technological challenges and flexibility to respond to the changes in the patterns of the hospital care service.
