Open-Sky Architecture

Belém Cultural Centre, Lisbon, Portugal

2018

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Vittorio Gregotti’s Belém cultural centre — Lisbon’s main art centre — the practice was invited to create an architectural installation built out of piled-up blocks of recycled cork agglomerate that also functions as an outdoor cinema during the city’s warm nights.

The project is devised as a combination of two open-air spaces, defined by an incomplete double colonnade evocative of a ruined structure, standing at the junction of the cultural centre’s main square. Two of ‘dwelling’ spaces invite different appropriations, one of them serving as an outdoor film auditorium.

The project evokes both a poetic ideal and the irrevocable condition of the passage of time in architecture — an installation whose spatial presence is intended to let visitors playfully meander through this promenade as an engaging architectural experience.

The project also celebrates the aesthetic singularity of this particular agglomerate; 100% recyclable and produced from the bark of Quercus suber, a species familiar to the Portuguese, but very rare and special in other places in the world.

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Models, conceptual evolution

Diagrams

Block piles at the plant

Plan and longitudinal section

Cork block piles

Aerial view

Between squares

Location: Belém Cultural Centre, Praça do Império, Lisbon, Portugal
Client: Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB)
Curator: André Tavares
Scope of services: Architecture
Project brief: Temporary architectural installation with open-air theatre
Plot area: 2,150 sq. m
Project status: 2018 (built)
Photography: Eduardo Montenegro (aerial), Francisco Nogueira, Promontorio (model and cork blocks) 

Main square