The Lux building is an ancient port warehouse, one of the first buildings in reinforced concrete structure of the waterfront, an engineer project with a structural concept for the 20's.
Converting this space into a theater, dance, art events and rendezvous points, it was the point of departure for a project whose program also asked for a sufficient neutrality in the final project, allowing to constitute as the ideal place for all kinds of plastic and artistic intervention, from exhibitions to chromatic intervention, from facilities to the sounds, from lighting intervention to video projections. A white screen that has its own personality, but doesn't enter in conflict with the several interventions that is prepared to receive.
The program also asked, and therefore, the absence of drawing, of the explicit design drawing that marked his own space with an author's personality, a kind of assumed neutrality, generating a site's identity.
The building had a powerful staircase, linking the two existing floors, and these to the terrace, purely functional and without any relation with the outside.
This staircase was one of the starting points of the project and through it, the entrance was defined, marked by an outer wall with metal that simultaneous exposes and conceals this entrance.
The space was maintained as much as possible with its own character.
The gate's system of the contact with the outside was remade and recovered to the upper room, a balcony overlooking the waters of Tagus River.
The maximum sophistication of the technical facilities of air treatment, light and sound, acoustic conditioning and lighting experts, aimed a invisible and sober answer, leaned on new and existing walls, on the periphery of the building, giving them an internal complexity that the outer coating doesn't demand evidence. The walls are like living organisms. The fixed and the movable walls, of large dimensions, can completely alter the space configuration.
The service areas needed, are the result of a doubling, to the inside, of the peripheral wall, inhabited by a second infrastructure system.
A new staircase was created, identical to the existing one, to achieve an internal connection between the room of the bar/exhibitions and night club.
The nightclub is densely chromatic and mutant.
The big room is white as a white screen would be.
Lux opens to the city the possibility of new communication scenarios, of contact with the river and with the urban landscape of Lisbon.
