The New Faculdade de Letras by Studio SPACEGRAM: A Sneak Peek Before It Opens to the Public

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In 1955, architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro completed the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa - the culmination of a project that had been in motion since 1918, and the realisation of a long-held ambition to give Lisbon a proper university campus. His plan was a grid: coherent, precise, with a shared identity running from the facades down to the furniture. Seventy years on, Lisbon-based studio SPACEGRAM, founded by Ana Ferrão, Bruno Pereira and Gilberto Pedrosa, in collaboration with architect Manuela Oliveira has spent five years adding a new extension to that story. We sat down with Bruno Pereira from the studio ahead of the building's opening.

The site you were working with had its own complicated history. Can you tell us about it?

The new building at FLUL sits on what was essentially a forgotten road - a service access to the café, invisible, underused. There was also an abandoned building on the site that had been closed for years. It got demolished in the process. We didn't waste it though: the material went into the foundations of the new one. The site had its own history and we folded it in, making it part of it but not something rooted in nostalgia. The open amphitheatre, for example, takes back its initial importance, turning a leftover edge into the most social space on campus. Students get new classrooms, as needed, but more importantly, new public areas for events, fairs, and gatherings. Spaces to actually be on campus, not just pass through it.

You've spoken about heritage as a dialogue. What does that mean in practice, and what restrictions did you encounter?

Heritage as a dialogue means that you can bring your own position, but you should listen first. It's not something embedded in nostalgia - that would be a pastiche. The planning framework demanded integration into the overall campus logic; you couldn't just land a building as an intervention. The budget was the other challenge: how do you build something that carries the quality of those interiors, that same sense of permanence, with reduced public commission budgets? Those two pressures — contextual and financial — shaped almost every decision we made.

How do you reconcile the different design languages - past, present and future?

The original Cidade Universitária was built with a very strong shared identity - a clear grid, a consistent facade rhythm, a geometric precision that reads across all the buildings. That coherence has eroded over the decades. The campus lost its centre. Our starting point was to understand that logic before proposing anything. We took the grid and the facade rhythm and reinterpreted them into a contemporary building — not copying anything, but evolving. The prefabricated concrete facade gave us the durability and geometric presence the campus language asks for, without pretending to be something built in 1961. Past, present and future are not separate registers to balance. They're layers of the same place. You read them, then you add your own line.

Light and acoustics seem to have been central to how you designed the classrooms. Why were those the non-negotiables?

Light and acoustics were the two things we refused to compromise on inside the classrooms. Everything else could be negotiated, but these two couldn't. The walls carry internal acoustic panels that control reverberation. The ceilings handle sound attenuation, the kind that means a professor can speak without projecting, and the student at the back still catches their every word. Large windows bring daylight in on every facade. Shading devices manage the glare, and the artificial lighting reads the moment, recalibrating throughout the day. These are rooms where you can actually hear and see each other. It sounds like a minimum, but these details matter the most.

Modernist architects designed the content of their buildings as much as the buildings themselves. How involved were you in the interiors and furniture?

Pardal Monteiro, Almada Negreiros, Daciano da Costa — for them, the original FLUL building was never just about architecture. The murals, the furniture, the graphic language of the interiors — all of it was part of the same authorial act. We approached the extension the same way, with a significantly tighter budget. The interiors were designed as part of the building from the start, not applied at the end. We designed specific pieces for the occasion: tables for the professors' offices, seating for the common room. We are also currently developing two bench sculptures for the atrium, drawn directly from Almada Negreiros' panels - taking that graphic language and turning it into something you can sit on. The heritage, once overshadowed, evolving once again.

Five years is a long time. What are you most proud of?

This building is the result of extensive team work. Five years means the briefing shifts, the budget gets revised, the world changes around you. What keeps a project alive through all of that isn't one person's vision, but the collective investment of everyone involved. We were genuinely lucky with the team we had. What we're most proud of is watching it grow from a concept into something concrete, literally. A site, then a foundation, then walls, then a building which people will use every day without thinking about how it got there. You see that progression and you feel the pride of everyone who built it. That's not something you design. It just happens, organically, when the work is honest.

The extension of the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa is a project by SPACEGRAM in collaboration with Architect Manuela Oliveira. The building opens to the public later this year.