THE CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM OF BUENOS AIRES

(projeto em parceria com os arquitetos Jeffer Henrich e Márcio Bonadia)

 

CONCEPT     

   The Buenos Aires’s new Museum of Contemporary Art project here presented is located at the border of Prata river, near the Puente de la Mujer and Presidente Sarmiento frigate, in an area of great urban development. The concept is to propose a reflection about museums architecture and its relation with expositions spaces.     

Nowadays, museum’s project explores a mercantilist appeal in a exceeding way, allocating to art a second role against the “architectural spectacle”.     

   Therefore, the Puerto Madero museum’s proposal brings back the sublime aesthetics provided through the connection between the contemplative experience of art and architecture. The combination between art and architecture must be done in a balanced way, without an attempt to overlap each other.     

   The building through a simple geometric form creates externally a harmony with the existing landscape composed by the warehouses. The solid volume is interrupted with strategic recesses that work as windows. This apertures reveals intriguing images of what exists inside, inviting the public to get in and discover. Is the attraction for the unknown and the search for the surprise and new.     

   When inside the building, the visitor will discover all the complexity within. The rooms are connected one each other as part of a greater structure, the museum itself. At the same time that there aren’t great formal complexity in the outside, inside organics and non rigid forms define the space.     

   The architecture’s concept is made by two opposites: the not-be and the being. One needs the other to exists, the useful areas dwells in the not-be defined by the external volume. The principal point is to think the museum from the inside to the outside. First, the internal galleries were created, after that, the connection between the rooms were established. The process is closed by the insertion of the external enclosure. The big external box homes the amorphous body. The architecture becomes a package of itself.     

   The principal goal is make people curious, instigate the public. The surprise and the mystery are part of the sublime, and are results of a experience possibly lived in plenitude when in contact with the building. The sensation of discomfort preceding reasoning can gives pleasure.

 

ILLUMINATION     

   All the museum illumination is thought in a scenographic way. Inside the galleries, the light is more intense creating an attractive effect. Something that tries to reproduce what happens with the moths in contact with light. This game of shadow and light becomes necessary to boost the sublime feeling.

 

STRUCTURE

   The museum’s internal structure is composed of freestanding concrete shelves in color white with some pillars distributed in a way to win large spans. At the same time, there is a metallic spatial structure that serves to create the external box which is closed with metal plates.

 

SUSTAINABILITY

   The project considers also the sustainability principals. The exposition galleries and openings for air and light were previously thought to minimize the building impact at the site. Vegetation niches were placed inside the building to create, in cold days, a greenhouse where the solar radiation penetrates the building through the holes at the façades. Now for the hot days, some of the openings at the box, allow the air to circulate through the building, working as a chimney where the hot air is released. There is also a preoccupation with the reuse of rain water to irrigate the green areas of the project. A parking place is not included in the project in a way to encourage the use of public transportation and the walking on foot.