Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown
This is a project by Charles Correa Associates and it is located at Lisbon, Portugal. Project's program: Translational Centre for Brain, Eye-sight and Cancer research. There are twenty eight images for Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown.
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- © Colin Mosher
Project details
Project images
Designer's statement
The Chamaplimaud Centre for the Unknown is located on a spectacular site where the Tagus river joins the Atlantic Ocean, and from where 500 years ago Vasco da Gama and the other great navigators left on their Voyages of Discovery — an apt metaphor for the cutting-edge cancer and brain research being undertaken in the Centre today.
The facilities covering a built-up area of 50000 sqm have been disaggregated into 3 buildings, creating between them a generous public plaza that leads diagonally across the site towards the Atlantic Ocean. And as one walks up the gently sloping plaza, all you see ahead is the sky. The enigmatic sky — the ultimate Unknown. Then gradually you become aware of the two monoliths, each 15 meters tall that announce the climax of the whole axis. But even when you finally arrive there, you do not see river or ocean — but a body of water, in which is partially submerged an enigmatic object, like a jelly fish. What is it? The back of a turtle? An island?… It is what you set out to discover.
As can be seen in the Site Plan, more than half the site has been given back to the citizens of Lisbon — and the public domain of this plaza and the private domain of the scientists are arranged in a kind of ying-yang interlock, so that both activities can exist without disturbing each other. The patients, doctors, and scientists look out into large courtyards and terrace gardens, at different levels — while the plaza connects at several places to the wide public promenade along the river front.
