Paula Rêgo Museum
I was lucky to choose the site, what increased my responsibility after the painter Paula Rêgo had chosen me as projectist. The site was a wood, all surrounded by a wall, with a big empty in the middle, some former club tennis courts, that had disappeared with the Carnation Revolution. With the trees survey, especially their tops, I have developed a set of volumes with different heights, to respond to the plurality of the program.
The boxes distribution works like a mineral positive, from the negative that remains from the tree top perimeter. This “Yang” and “Yin” game between artifact and nature, helped me to decide the exterior material, red concrete, the opposite color to the green wood, that meanwhile decreased by botanic prophylaxis. As I didn’t want the building to be a neutral sum of boxes, I have established a hierarchy, introducing two big pyramids (skylights) in the entrance axis, that are the library and the café, where it wasn’t indifferent Alcobaça’s kitchen, some houses from arch. Raul Lino and some illustrations from Boullé. It was my concerning that every exhibition room had always an opening to the exterior , to the garden. It’s never too much to oppose the abstract and totally artificial reality of contemporary art to the daily and ruff reality that surround us.
