Ibere Camargo museumPorto alegre brazIlalvaro sIza

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… all bleached white in situ concrete, rising for three levels, embraced by three concrete ramps, like tentacles, cantilevered clear of the building’s façade, projected out towards the river…

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At age 75 Portugal’s most revered modern architect ventures away from his native home only occasionally, preferring to live, work and teach in and around Porto, the city he has made his own and the place most closely connected with his architecture.Yet despite a career spanning more than five decades and a body of work that ranks him among the greatest modern architects of his generation – not to mention being the recipient of just about every major international award you can think of, including the Pritzker Prize (1992), the Alvar Aalto Medal, the Golden Lion from the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the 2009 Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects, though he’s never had a permanent work realized in Britain – Siza remains a relatively obscure figure, largely unknown to all but architects and serious lovers of the art. He is responsible for some of the world’s most celebrated buildings, and his works are each essays on the possibilities of using simple materials and basic geometric volumes to shape architectural space in profound and poetic ways. Spare and elemental, always restrained, mostly bone-white, his are buildings that appear to belong as naturally to the sites they inhabit as if the landscapes they so subtly grace would be incomplete without them.Siza has designed buildings outside Europe only rarely: a municipal centre in Rosario, Argentina in 2002; the Anyang Garden Pavilion in South Korea in 2006; and now this, the Ibere Camargo Foundation Museum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The museum houses a collection of more than 4000 works – paintings, drawings, gouaches and prints – by the noted regional expressionist artist Ibere Camargo (1914-1994). It is the first major museum by an international architect in Brazil. It is also his most sculptural work to date.

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In an age when celebrity architects seem to be constantly jetting around the globe, Alvaro Siza must seem like an anachronism.

Squeezed onto a tight, triangular plot between a lush cliff face, a highway and the Rio Guaiba – “one of those South American rivers that seem like a sea,” says Siza – the Ibere Camargo Museum is a curvaceous affair; all bleached white insitu concrete, rising for three levels, embraced by three concrete ramps, like tentacles, cantilevered clear of the building’s façade, projected out towards the river and the expansive Porto Alegre landscape.The narrowness of the elongated wedge-shaped site, the requirements of the programme – nine exhibition halls, a print studio, an educational studio, an auditorium, a research and documentation centre, museum shop, café and below ground car parking – and the client’s insistence on rear access for art deliveries, away from the busy high-speed road at its front, called for an inspired response. A low water table limiting the amount of excavation compounded the problems for design even further.Arriving at a balance under such restrictive circumstances was always going to produce an eccentric outcome. “Difficult situations are often a good way of finding special solutions,” Siza has said. And indeed he has; producing one his most striking formal and spatial compositions: a mix of forms and volumes derived from a strong response to site and programme rather than from any contrived formal ambitions. This building exudes a vibrant sensuality that contrasts markedly with the corporate sterility of so many new museums around the world today.Dominated by a great, toplit internal void – Siza has described early visions of the museum built around “a big hole” – the building is defined on one side by an L-shaped succession of rooms, each of different dimensions, to form an orthogonal corner between two vertical circulation cores. On the river side the building takes a curve out – literally bellying out – reflecting the curve of the cliff face, a former quarry, into which it is so neatly nestled.

A series of internal and external ramps form the principal means of circulation throughout the museum. Three sets of switchback ramps, each rising half a level, cling to the internal faces of the sinuous wall before leaping out as dramatic faceted cantilevers wrapped like fingers around the exterior façade, to help visitors continue their journey.Clarity and flexibility are provided by offering a choice of routes: visitors may choose to take a lift to the top level and walk the ramps down, or climb up from the ground floor, in touch at all times with the mighty void that rises for the full height of the building. In either direction, this circulation pattern allows visitors to roam in a zigzag journey that leads them through exhibition spaces, changing orientation from one level to the next.In this manner Siza gives visitors full appreciation of the building’s curious form as they walk leisurely through the museum. There are parallels here with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York; and the sensuous curves and white concrete of Oscar Niemeyer. There are references, also, to the eccentric web of enclosed walkways connecting the concrete towers of the Pompeia Cultural Centre (1984) in Sao Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi, the Italian-Brazilian architect.Siza describes the experience of journey along the ramps as a matter of comfort, giving visitors a break between each suite of rooms, either with internal views up and through the void, or by glimpsing views of the landscape outside from one of the small, sparingly and carefully placed windows in the concrete ramps clinging to the face of the building.Despite the museum’s concerns about lack of light and any connection with the surrounding landscape, Siza chose to control light and views with his carefully placed apertures… amplifying the scale of the landscape and the effect of the light.The Ibere Camargo Foundation Museum is in many ways the ideal project for Siza. He has deep emotional ties to Brazil. His father was born there and he has always been enchanted by Brazil’s early embrace of Modernism and its tinge of hedonism.

“My father told many stories about Brazil,” he says. “When I came here for the first time as an adult I felt like I was in Portugal, but with a tropical atmosphere…more free.” JR

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Floor plans

01 car-park entrance 02 pedestrian access 03 car-park 04 car-park exit 05 workshop 06 office 07 meeting room 08 library reserve 09 library 10 reserve 11 technical area 12 auditorium 13 security 14 technical area 15 mezzanine 16 cafeteria 17 museum entrance 18 ticket office 19 hall-stand 20 reception 21 atrium 22 bookshop 23 storage 24 exhibition room

Project DescriptionFundacao Ibera Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil, requested a building to house the archive and exhibitions of their collection of works by Ibere Camargo. The site is bordered on the north by Avenida Padre Cacique and bounded on the south by a cliff which rises from five to twenty four metres.The programme includes spaces for exhibition, storage, library and video library, bookstore, café, small auditorium, administrative offices and artists’ workshops.The building base comprises a long platform, 600mm above the road level, under which are located some of the programme areas. The platform is accessed from the road via a ramp. The principal volume is carved out against the cliff vegetation, occupying its concave space, and results in the superposition of four floors, including a ground floor at the platform level. This volume is enclosed by a straight and almost orthogonal wall on the south and west, and by an undulating wall on the north and east.This undulating wall, which rises the entire height of the building, encloses the access atrium, which is surrounded by the exhibition halls (an equal sequence, on the three floors above, of three rooms of varying dimensions) and by reception, coatroom and bookstore on the ground floor. Permanent and temporary exhibition spaces are not differentiated, opting for a flexibility appropriate to the actual functioning of museums (the collection itself makes for temporary exhibitions of different themes).The halls of all floors can be opened onto the atrium space, or closed by moveable four-metre high panels, allowing natural light from the atrium and between this height and the ceiling. The rooms of the last floor receive natural and artificial light from skylights made of double-paned glass, accessible for cleaning and maintenance. The atrium receives light from a skylight located on the terrace and by exterior openings in the undulating wall.The vertical accesses (two elevators and two sets of stairs) are situated at each extreme end of the sequence of exhibition halls. Also included is a system of ramps, with slopes of between eight and nine percent, which develop partially within the atrium and partially externally, creating closed galleries, surrounding the volume of the building, occasionally opened by small windows onto the beautiful landscape and by skylights. Alvaro Siza Vieira Arquitecto

… striking formal and spatial compositions: a mix of forms and volumes derived from a strong response to site and programme rather than from any contrived formal ambitions…

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Project Ibere Camargo Foundation MuseumLocation Porto Alegre, BrazilArchitect Alvaro Siza VieiraPrincipals in charge Barbara Rangel, Pedro PoloniaProject Team Michele Gigante, Francesca Montalto, Atsuhi Ueno, Rita AmaralStructural engineers Gop, LdaMechanical engineers Gop, LdaAcoustic engineers Gop, LdaElectrical & Hydraulic Gop, LdaPhotographer Fernando Guerra

issue 11 Ibere Camargo Museum