The “Brisa Store” is understood as an infrastructure open to the public, allowing the direct exchange of information and giving assistance to the growing number of Via Verde users.
It was requested a single block building with an image that could be multiplied by the large highway’s network, which is also growing. The building should, then, impose itself, whether in form as in function, over the diversity of surrounding spaces acting like a trademark image for the purpose for which it was conceived.
The standardization and modulation, allied to a systematic constructive process (as it is possible to be produced in a factory shipyard), were the followed premises, in order to reduce the construction time schedule.


Therefore, it was decided to opt by simple forms, associated with a technologic trend that could represent its content, the movement, the mobility, our time.
A glass box is proposed, a parallelepiped of light and multiple colours, which flux and mutability follow the lines of light defined on the roads.
By this means, different images contrast in the same building, according to the time factor. In the daytime, a strong volume, transparent and partially reflective, where the white prevails; at night time the colour, the transparency and the light, that allows the building to expel its own light, regular and without reflexes.

The space conception stands on the square and on its subdivision, modular. The box, with a square shaped base, is subdivided on the interior in two rectangles with the same area, though different in terms of form and function:
- An immaculately white void, accessed by the public in general, marked by two cubes where the attendance to the public is made and filled by black details that materialize the waiting room.
- A filled volume, of private access, visibly black, that opens itself to the outside through a subtracted volume with a similar module used on the attendance cubes.
Public and private realms are here covered by a uncoloured printed glass skin, on the inside on which shade screens act according the sunlight exposure and the inside temperature of the building, filtering and controlling the greater or lesser permeability of the whole.

B R I S A S T O R E

Location
Oeiras, Portugal

Year
2005

Team
Miguel Marques, Sofia Salazar Leite, Rita Silva, João Pedro Miguel

Photography
FG+SG