Gondwana Bookshop is currently housed on the ground floor of a 1930s building in the Campo Pequeno district of Lisbon.
The space it occupies consists of several rooms that were once independent: a former café–pastry shop, the refectory area of a pharmacy, a veranda, and a small patio, later unified during the renovation of the building that contains them.

In recent years, real estate pressure—driven primarily by foreign capital—has led to the sale of the modernist building in which the bookshop is located and its adaptation to new aesthetic, technological, regulatory, and comfort standards for the development of luxury apartments.

The ground-floor spaces that now host the bookshop have been overwhelmed by these transformation processes. Traditionally home to functions related to neighborhood and community life, these spaces have been partially sacrificed to meet the requirements of the new residential program.

In particular, one portion of the ground floor was incorporated into the building’s entrance hall to create a new corridor providing access to the elevator; another part was occupied by the reinforced concrete elevator shaft itself and by partition walls built to conceal the building’s new technological wiring; moreover, most of the new water drainage systems run visibly beneath the ground-floor ceiling. The space thus becomes a kind of sacrificial site: a residual space, progressively eroded, absorbing the infrastructures and additions required for the building’s new technological and aesthetic upgrade—a sort of palimpsest of the technical and spatial modifications the building has undergone, bearing witness to a broader political, economic, and social transformation of the city.

Starting from these premises, the project adopts a critical stance toward the transformation logics redefining the city’s built heritage as an object of tourist consumption and real estate speculation. Commercial spaces are frequently subjected to renovations due to processes of commercial gentrification, storefrontization, and urban commodification. The project therefore chooses to suspend judgment on the existing space, not to erase what it finds, but to attach itself to what is already there, generating a stratigraphy of different geographies and temporalities destined to coexist.

In this way, the project brings into dialogue two imaginaries: the pre-existing space, with its material traces of Portuguese culture (azulejos, herringbone wooden floors), and the Gondwana world—a symbol of the union of the continents of the Global South—evoked through books, mobile marble tables recalling the geographies of the Southern Hemisphere, undulating mirrored furnishings, and transparent corrugated shelves that in some way recall the transparency of water and oceans.

Many of the elements used to complete the missing parts of the pre-existing structure—such as azulejos, sanitary fixtures, and doors—as well as other introduced elements, such as the stone tables, come from reused materials derived from demolitions or production waste. The reflection on what it means today to practice architecture in a post-carbon world arises not only from the reuse of materials and the decision not to introduce new ones (for example, most of the space has no new flooring), but also from the choice to reduce almost to zero the demolitions associated with spatial reconfiguration; to design and produce lightweight, modular, and easily transportable furnishings so they can be entirely reused in another location without discarding anything; and to install all plumbing, electrical, and air-conditioning systems visibly, without intervening in the existing masonry structure—thus avoiding debris production and making the space easily adaptable to new uses in the future. 

Performative Space – The Creation of a Third Place
The space presents itself as a flexible organism, capable of transformation thanks to mobile devices—extendable tables, fold-down bookshelves, counters and display units on wheels, curtains—that enable variable configurations and multiple uses.

Each new element is conceived to assume a changing position and, if necessary, to relocate, so that it may occupy another place. In this perspective, the bookshop can change its appearance and function, expanding the range of possible relationships between space and neighborhood life. Architecture thus appears as an assemblage of socio-technological devices, in which ordinary elements—hinges, wheels, folding mechanisms, hooks, variable-colored lights—see their technical character oriented toward the creation of an informal meeting space, capable of fostering practices of sociability, collective production, and community building.