Project Ines Lobo Arquitectos
Photos Leonardo Finotti
Text Laura Ragazzola

Observing the 17th-century walls of the beautiful city of Evora, a sort of citymuseum listed as world heritage by UNESCO, one immediately notices the architecture of the historic Leõe facility (first a mill, then a pasta factory) for its large size, looming on the level ground around the old fortifications.

The municipality of Evora had often wondered what to do with the place, after the factory stopped operations towards the end of the 1970s. A cumbersome presence in the territory, but at the same time a precious remnant of the city’s history, the factory founded in 1916 finally entered a new phase of its life in 2010: after decades of abandon its workspaces have been transformed into places for education. A competition was held, won (hands down) by the studio of the Portuguese architect Ines Lobo, who recently came into the international spotlight as winner of the ArcVision Prize — Women and Architecture 2014, the important honor organized by Italcementi Group to recognize outstanding female architectural talent. In her own country, however, Ines Lobo was already well known, thanks to an illustrious career, mostly in the area of the architecture of education facilities. “I won all the competitions,” the designer told us, when we met her during the prize ceremony at the Research and Innovation Center of Italcementi Group in Bergamo in April. “Since the start of my activity — I opened my studio in Lisbon at the end of the 2000s — I have concentrated on public spaces. In just a few years our work increased (along with our staff) thanks above all to our participation in competitions held by the Portuguese government for the renovation of school buildings. We won four of those contests: our job was to reinvent the school of the future. How? By recovering spaces, history, memory, starting with what already existed. In other words, our slogan was (and is): the past projected into the future, to reuse without squandering, to add without waste.” This is what has recently happened in the project for the School of Arts and Architecture of Evora, which the designer says “adapts to the existing factory, not vice versa.” Lobo explains: “We wanted to reuse the existing spaces, a legacy full of history and beauty, because I think design means continuity, involving a process of remaking of the same elements. But inside the imposing walls of the factory life had been absent for a long time: we brought it back with new workshops, classrooms, the dining hall, the students, the professors… Because architecture is a container of life and people: this is its miracle.” The project set out to interpret, with a different gaze, the wealth and complexity of the place and the construction, working through subtraction first and then addition. To get started, the buildings added over the course of the years, volumes alien to the true nature of the original construction, were removed. “We actually moved in a direction that differed from that of the guidelines,” Lobo says, “which called for reuse of all the volumes, even the later additions (four of them), inserted when the business of the factory was growing. Instead, we decided to sacrifice them, which also led to significant savings, while completely renovating the older part of the factory: so the heart of the old factory becomes the heart of the new university.” A new volume (“we call it the TGV, because it reminds you of a train”) has replaced the four old buildings: it combines metal and concrete, because the project also ‘reuses’ the materials of the territory, those immediately available without the need for transport from a distance. The ‘TGV’ is a functional link between old and new, applying a language that is directly based on that of industrial architecture, as Lobo explains: “You learn from what exists, in order to construct the contemporary. In Evora, in fact, we identified successful strategies, ‘inherited’ from the old factory, and then adapted them to the educational functions. A concrete example? The large canopies that protected the rail platforms in the shipping and receiving areas, utilized in the new university facility to shelter students and professors, creating a gathering place, a place for life. This is another confirmation of the fact that the architecture of the past has a direct relationship with the contemporary world. Even in the most revolutionary projects.”