Rehabilitating 3 × 3 Schools: The Paradigm of a Typified Case

The School architecture responded with standardized models to the need for rapid construction, with controlled costs, time and material resources, reflecting the social and political changes that resulted from the 25th of April revolution. The standardized pavilion type solution, based on the ideal of an industrial production, appeared in the 1980s, under the 3 × 3 designation, and was replicated throughout the national territory. However, although this strategy met the conditions emerging at that time, it was noted that the architectural solution favourised a dilution of the values that had been characterising the public-school building, whether those relating to the urban setting, the social dimension, or the significance and recognition of the educational institution through its architecture. In 2007, within the scope of a large-scale rehabilitation operation, conducted by the Programme for the Modernisation of Secondary Schools (PMEES) and promoted by Parque Escolar, E.P.E., buildings of that type were also rehabilitated with the aim of becoming efficient and effective schools in response to the pedagogical, social and urban needs posed by contemporaneity, making them able to make themselves (re)known as facilities for public education. This article aims to reflect analytically and comparatively on the results of the rehabilitation of this type of schools. How did these schools, non-hierarchical, unconnected and uncommitted to the urban fabric, anonymous and architecturally considered of less value, benefit from a rehabilitation process? In what way have they been transformed and brought back to contemporary times? How have they been re-dignified?