Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown
'What makes me most proud about this project’, says architect Charles Correa, ‘is that it is not a Museum of Modern Art… I’m fed up of these things’. He is talking about the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, a great sculptural complex set in landscaped, waterside surroundings, suggesting a cultural project intended to create the ‘Bilbao effect’. ‘On the contrary,’ says Correa, its purpose is ‘to help people grappling with real problems: cancer, brain damage, going blind’.
In fact, the story of the centre starts with Portugal’s richest man, industrialist António de Sommer Champalimaud, going blind. He died in 2004, leaving €500m (£435m) to establish the Champalimaud Foundation for biomedical research. Its director João Botelho toured Europe and North America, meeting scientists and looking at research institutes. He was so impressed by Correa’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completed in 2005, that he rang Correa at his practice in Mumbai to ask if he would look at the site Champalimaud had acquired for its centre. On a drizzly evening in 2007, the men walked out where the river Tagus flows into the Atlantic, adjacent to the 490-year old Tower of Belém built to celebrate the exploits of Vasco da Gama and other intrepid Portuguese explorers in the Age of Discovery. They found the site locked but, Correa recalls, ‘that night, going to sleep, I knew that whatever else we did, the site must be structured along a powerful architectural diagonal axis, an open-to-sky space, going right from the entrance to the opposite corner, where you finally see the river beginning to merge with the ocean and the great unknown.
’Half of Champalimaud’s 60,000 sq m is given to public gardens and waterfront promenades. The centre offers diagnosis and treatment, but is also a launch pad for research that will take scientists into uncharted territory, just as its location did for the great navigators. Correa says the site’s history is ‘a perfect metaphor for the discoveries of modern science’.
The centre was officially opened last year but is only now coming to life as equipment and scientists arrive. The architectural axis defines a 125m-long public pathway between two marble-clad citadels with curving facades punctuated by great elliptic windows. The gentle slope of the path renders the ocean ahead invisible. ‘When you walk there, you cannot help thinking of who went from that point 500 years ago,’ says Correa. At its top, seven metres above ground level, two monolithic 15m-high columns of blue concrete stand like guardians before a pool that appears to touch the sea beyond. Like an infinity pool, its 15cm-deep water flows gently over its far edge. In it is an enigmatic, mirrored dome reflecting the sky. Correa says just that its meaning is ‘what you have set out to discover’.
For Correa, the axial passage is a reference to the famous plaza between research buildings at Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, completed in 1966 and also open to the sea. He visited Salk in the Seventies and recalls that ‘when you go there, you’ll feel you can see all the way to China.’ Kahn had originally intended to have an orchard there, but the Mexican architect Luis Barragán suggested the water channel that runs along it instead. Correa says that ‘I don’t have any trees on the plaza because I began to see that the project was really about three stone ships sailing in a sea of granite.’
Two of these ships are the centre’s main buildings, clad in Portuguese Lioz marble. The four-storey, 32,629 sq m Building A is the larger, and full of transparency. The airy reception atrium is divided from its most spectacular feature, 2,700 sq m of enclosed garden, by a curtain wall comprising 19.2m of suspended glass. The original intention was to house a rainforest, but with fully grown palm trees currently dominating the plantings, it is better described as a tropical garden. It is open to the air not just beneath an open pergola, but by great metallic-lined oval apertures that seem to have melted out of the full-height walls separating it from the centre’s axial passage outside. From the research terrace on its other side, they present surrealistic glimpses of buildings, walkways and the river beyond. Correa pinpoints the garden’s ‘healing presence’ as one of the three elements, along with ‘the water around us’ and ‘the sky above’.
Building A is split longitudinally, and in its other half, the two lower floors contain diagnosis and clinical facilities. Some 300 patients a day can be treated, and there’s also a hairdresser, beauty shop, prayer room and a children’s playroom. At the site’s apex, a walled exterior garden of stepped rectilinear stone contains granite planters offering ‘chemotherapy’ of sorts.
All signage is in Portuguese and English, with ceramic location symbols by Studio Dumbar of Rotterdam. Heavy equipment is tucked away on the lowest floor, including a gamma camera and, behind 2m-thick concrete walls, a particle accelerator. The two upper floors are for research, with laboratories off a long corridor that occupants have dubbed ‘Sunset Boulevard’. A gallery of cancer laboratory workbenches runs along a terrace above the enclosed garden. Animals such as flies (but no primates) will be experimented on under ‘strict ethical guidelines’. The top floor is for neuroscience. The shell-space is generous, to future-proof Champalimaud against
the demands of new technology. The technical fit-out is being implemented by Hillier of Philadelphia, now part of RMJM.
Buildings A and B are linked by an ethereal 21m-long tubular bridge of stratified glass and steel, engineered by Professor Jens Schneider of Darmstadt University and Bellapart of Olot, Spain. It leads into administration offices in the smaller building. The boardroom is discretely enriched by baroque chairs and a canvas by rococo painter François Boucher, and has its own private garden terrace. Nearby is the auditorium, with a ceiling curved on two axes for acoustic properties, and seating by Figueras. The eye-opener here is another great egg-shaped window 14m wide and 7m high. Correa had drawn frame lines for glass but the foundation wanted a single, unbroken pane, so four sheets of acrylic weighing 8.5 tonnes were laminated by the team that fitted out the Lisbon Aquarium. Lowering curtains to blind the window evokes a great eye closing. On the ground floor is the Darwin Restaurant, with English leather sofas, red torus lightshades, and quotes from Darwin on the walls. There is also a 400-capacity exhibition space.
The third ‘stone ship’ is a public amphitheatre, its stage set against the backdrop of the river. Deserted, it feels
as if it could be the setting of a de Chirico dreamscape, but soon scientific meetings and performances will fill this place.
When the centre was inaugurated last October, Correa had fallen and broken a hip, and appeared in a wheelchair. The Portuguese president and prime minister attended, and the Champalimaud Foundation president, former health minister Leonor Beleza, declared it open by writing on one of the concrete columns. The Lisbon Architecture Triennale, then underway, was oddly silent about Champalimaud, although its organisers say, ‘we tried to establish a partnership but we were not successful.’
Champalimaud is a long way from Mathew Street, the genteel backwater facing Mumbai’s Western Railway lines, where Correa is based. He is now 80, and is closing his practice after 52 years. ‘It’s better to stop when you’re ahead,’ he comments. As an architect and planner, he is legendary. His first built work, the Gandhi Memorial Museum in Ahmedabad, was opened in 1963 by first Indian prime minister Jawarhalal Nehru, and Rajiv Gandhi personally appointed him as head of India’s National Commission on Urbanisation in 1985. His legacy ranges from the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations in New York to low-cost housing in Mumbai’s Dharavi ‘slum’.
Two projects remain in the pipeline – a design facility for Mahindra in Chennai, and the Ismaili Centre in Toronto, to open in 2013. From then on, Correa will be concentrating on his native India alone. He is establishing a foundation in Goa where he will work pro bono and involve local people in planning.
The £87m Champalimaud Centre is an extraordinary design achievement. It is a partially solar-powered, high-tech building, yet has none of the cold steeliness of the high-tech style, and it embodies a cool, timeless post-modernism, ‘without’, he says, ‘resorting to ersatz fashions’.
Despite Portugal’s architectural star shining with Eduardo Souta da Moura’s Pritzker, a foreign architect has designed what must be the country’s best building of the century so far. Correa praises Portuguese architecture and sees a ‘wonderful sense of something which is monumental’ in Alvaro Siza’s work that Champalimaud shares. Certainly, his approach to its location is vital, drawing deeply on Portugal’s spirit and history. Correa’s ethos has always recognised ‘the importance of the built-form revealing what [Norwegian architectural theorist Christian] Norberg-Schulz calls the genius loci of the site’.
But Correa also brings to something uniquely Indian to Champalimaud, which has always run through his work. ‘Just about all my buildings have been concerned with the metaphysical qualities of open-to-sky space,’ he explains. Almost everyone of them, starting with the Gandhi Memorial Museum at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, and continuing on to Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal (an arts complex opened in 1982) and the Jawaharlal Kala Kendra in Jaipur (a cultural centre opened in 1991) are ‘structured around the ritualistic pathway – a journey crucial to the architectural experience’.
At the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, the metaphysical presence of sky and the ritualistic pathway are Correa’s known unknowns. Along with so much else there, they serve to create an extraordinary environment conducive to well-being and therapy and, simultaneously, a sense of wonder.
