Reabilitação e Reconversão do Colégio de S. Sebastião e Real Fábrica de Lanifícios
Paços do Concelho de Portalegre
The Jesuit College is composed by two buildings. The first, to the East, corresponds to the church, built between the 16th and 17th centuries. This building follows the model that the Company of Jesus decided to build from the end of the 16th century onwards. It has a wide nave, composed by four sections, three of them corresponding to
the lateral communicating chapels, a high choir over the entrance.
Everything was dominated by a clerestory surmounted by three rectangular large windows. It follows the typology of the wide nave church that can be compared to “Il Gesù chiesa” in Rome, by Vignola. Divided in three stories, by wooden pavements, in the XVIII century, forced in its functional structure, with some windows and doors changed, the spaces fragmented, the
Church was unrecognizable at the time of its acquisition.
Addorsed to the Church, to the West, is the College. The access is made through a porch, built afterwards according to the Baroque grammar, that leads to a foyer. To the right of the foyer a corridor, leads to several compartments. The larger one, situated at North, would have been the sacristy.
From the foyer, now facing West, the vaulted spaces succeed one next to the other leading to a wing, parallel to the Church, where another one perpendicular succeeded enclosing a cloister space that was never finished.
Facing the North façade, where the west wing would have been situated, we perceive that the two last doors, of the balcony windows sequence, are fake and are made out of mortar imitating stone,.
The bottom of the main stairs was located in the corridor leading to the second floor. Here the space typology is defined by the wall structure, with a height of 5m measured at the highest point of the vaults, against the 6,4m
on the first floor. The spaces sequence is magnificent in its Jesuit austerity, with the large corridor windows enclosing the tops. In the second floor some of the original vaults were already missing. The towers were also
demolished, leaving the facade depleted of scale and proportion. Over the main altar, we have the Chapter Room with a barrel vault that still has its original “bas relief” decoration.
The last quarter of the 18th century witnesses the addorsment of a new building to the Church. This building was developed in the continuity of the main façade, facing East, 50 meters long an three stories high. It had a wide industrial nave with 11,5m measured at the cornice and with 17,5m at the ridge of the roof. It had a wood pavement, having a useful floor space in most of the area - a prototype of the wide industrial naves that were
built around the end of the 19th century. Supporting the roof, a structure composed by complex trusses in wood, transfer the strain onto the granite pillars, overcoming the 18,3 m span. Finally addorsed to the Royal Factory’s Northern facade, a series of rather recent constructions, spurious and of bad quality, degraded the rest of the building and limited the intervention being demolished afterwards.
The first step of the intervention was to proceed to a profound interpretative analysis of the buildings, through their observation in situ, historical research and the materials analysis. The investigation supports "typological restitution" as the intervention first principle.
Fundamental to the typological reestitution is the reintegration of the primitive wall structure with its original design. Also important was the recuperation of the spatial units that characterize the buildings. The rehabilitation
of these massive units “at least the most important ones” is the "ratio sine qua non" to transform this intervention into a typological restitution intervention. It was fundamental to eliminate compartments and their respective
subdivisions, its functional allotments (with a clear fragmental character) and the elements added afterwards of poor quality construction.
The principle of typological restitution also implies the inclusion in the project solution of what could have been the project previous to the 18th century. This exercise presupposed an analytical effort that justifies the
operational decisions that are part of its own memory.
The second parameter was the acceptance of a functional program, adjusting the defined requirement plan, correcting and adapting the solution according to the buildings’ analysis and to the purpose of its typological rehabilitation, which implied prioritising its compositional condition over the functional program.
The research stages are too complex to be summarised, having included a rigorous architectonic survey: the projects’ set of drawings, dated from the 17th and 18th centuries, archived in the Lisbon National Library; the
study of the Company of Jesus colleges and buildings collections of drawings, namely in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale Paris, France; the Fondo Gesuítico collection in Rome, Italy.
After this study it was possible to reconstruct what would have been the original building and to find solutions that ensured the defined intervention principles.
We highlight two aspects: First, the identification of similarities between the College of Salvador in Elvas and the College in Portalegre was fundamental to understanding the building and defining this project’s solutions.
Second, the two colleges have the same author/architect. Currently an investigation is being made that will determine, without any doubts, the authorship of the two buildings. This aspect takes us to the second relevant issue: the Portalegre College authorship was attributed to Mateus do Couto, the Court Architect of King Afonso
VI. This attribution was based on the drawings, dated from 1678, of a Jesuit Church in Portalegre, archived in the Lisbon National Library. Some of the drawings of this collection, dated circa the 1st quarter of the 17th century, depict the existing building. We assume that these are drawings that belong to the original project. Nevertheless the ground plan and the section, signed by Mateus do Couto, do not correspond to the built Church.
The intervention criteria were based on the rehabilitation and restoration of all the existing elements with formal or documental significance. The frescoes on the 1st floor and the Church spandrel were all restored. The “bas relief” ceiling in the Chapter room was also restored covered. The College entrance door, probably dated from the end of 17th century, which had been removed from the building, was restored and replaced.
The four missing vaults, on the 1st floor, were rebuilt according to the 17th century materials and techniques.
The principle of typological restitution - recovering the buildings’ original wall structure - facilitated the structural consolidation, restoring the constructive elements’ coherence. The filling in of the walls, in the meantime
demolished, and the connections to the existing structures were made with the help of staples and injections of non retracting concrete and polyester resins. The totality of the building, including the vaults, was consolidated
with metallic net casings and non retracting concretes. The roof structure was made with laminated wood structures, reducing the weight and avoiding the usage of trusses.
A strict variety of materials was used in the two buildings: white plaster, grey granite, grey painted steal, glass, cherry wood used in carpentries and bubinga wood on pavements. Due to the non existence of all the constructive elements (e.g. some doors, windows) the construction assumed the formal contemporaneity of the
elements that were necessary to introduce for the completion of the Project. The used granite comes from the same geological formation as the original. The non-adjectival language of the new elements design tried to be consentaneous with the formal austerity present in the Jesuit College and in the industrial nave.
The search of a coherent formal speech guided the project towards an exercise of integral design. For instance, the necessity of auditorium chairs that would formally relate with the materials, with the existing shapes and with the church spatiality resulted in the development of a unique model produced by a company from Barcelona,
now commercialized at an international level by the manufacturer.
The Royal Factory intervention assumed distinct characteristics. It was composed by a unique nave, without a resisting structure or space division, the existing compartments were precarious elements resulting from the needs of the several users. The Project tried to recover the concept of a wide area with the current technical means and materials. Considering the 18m width the building was vertically opened in the centre with a skylight in the roof and having, in each end, two points of vertical access. The perception of the nave’s over dimension was recovered and preserved. The lifts and lifts’ boxes, completely made of glass do not disturb the comprehension
of the nave.
Exclusively occupied by the municipal services, the space division is made through the usage of partitions allowing a spatial variation according to the functional evolution of the municipal activities.
The articulation between the project and the programmed interventions for the surroundings, within the scope of POLIS, (Urban Spaces Re-qualification Program) implemented in the Garden adjacent to the building, allowed the renovation of the totality of the street front creating a framing space functionally articulated with the
underground parking lot and the garden.