Architect 2016-01

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On the agricultural outskirts of Óbidos, Portugal, a
small town about 50 miles north of Lisbon, a voided
white square sits atop an undulating landscape near
the intersection of Rua da Inovação and Rua da
Criatividade. The square structure is the main building
of the Óbidos Technological Park, a new complex
of co-working offices for startups that aims to be,
true to its purpose-built streets, the town’s center of
innovation and creativity.
Lisbon-based Jorge Mealha Arquitecto won the
city-sponsored international competition to design
the project in 2010. Completed in July 2014, the
44,089-square-foot complex comprises three structures:
two single-story buildings topped with a square
centerpiece, which principal Jorge Mealha describes as
“a thin building levitating over the ground.”
The two 11,000-square-foot first-floor buildings
contact the square building at four main structural
supports, each containing stairs and elevators as well
as the piping, ductwork, and technical guts of the
building. Two additional V-shaped concrete structures
support the upper building as it projects over a central
plaza bordered by the cave-like first-floor buildings
and a gentle slope created from the dirt excavated to
build them.
“The design strategy disguises the ground floor so
you don’t see it as a building,” Mealha says. “So you
don’t have the difficulty of reading two buildings with
two different principles working together.”
Clad in Cor-Ten steel and covered in grass, these
first-floor buildings house shops, a restaurant, a
multipurpose room, and a fabrication lab for the tech
companies incubating above. The square volume
contains more than 60 offices, averaging 215 square
feet, which are accessed by a glass-lined hallway along
the building’s inside perimeter. Mealha calls this
hallway a cloister, inspired by the many monasteries
in the region, and it features views across to the
hallway’s three other sides and into the plaza below. A
membrane of lacquered and perforated steel grating
wraps the exterior, giving it an almost mechanical
mask. At night, internal lighting bleeds out into the
surrounding landscape.
The project’s parameters called not only for
facilities to nurture startups and techies, but also a new
public space. “For us it was a strange question because
they were asking for a main piazza in the middle of a
countryside,” Mealha says. “A piazza normally results
as a point of balance between the forces within the
city.” Absent those forces, Mealha used differing forms
to create that citylike intersection of mixed uses and
building types. And as both an active space and a
landmark, the building is a new center for the region.