Retail space in a residential building from the early 21st century, with a large window over the Campo Grande Garden, converted into architects’ office.

The shop window, which displayed a bank branch for many years, is rethought as a large conventional window, to receive natural light and the view of the Campo Grande trees.

Inside, and despite the importance given to light and trees, we resisted the apparent inevitability of the open, continuous, multifunctional workspace. We sought rather to design spaces that are distinct, comfortable, domestic in scale and proportion. The main spaces – entrance and reception space, design room, meeting room, individual office – are arranged in depth and separated by clear glass blocks. These blocs allow light and view through all the spaces but are assembled as brickwork, with the weight and thickness of a traditional wall. The other materials – terrazzo tiles, plaster, exposed reinforced concrete, oak wood – are reminiscent of the industrial architecture that occupied ground floors of many buildings in Bairro de Alvalade and Avenidas Novas, and which has always fascinated us.

The services – ventilation, air conditioning, electricity, telecommunications, fire safety, information – are grouped together above the circulation and secondary spaces. The main spaces remain thus free over their entire width and, above all, their height, up to the structural slab of the upper floor. The secondary spaces, grouped along a corridor in an invisible widening of the space, have a very different nature, and function like the dark in the chiaroscuro of a Baroque painting. The result is that the window over the office is a window on a succession of spaces and glass reticules that are sometimes as hard and dark as stone (at dawn), sometimes as soft and luminous as rice paper (at dusk).