Buenos Aires Contemporary Art Museum / Monoblock

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: Monoblock
Year: 2013

Text description provided by the architects. Milestone

In a beachfront site on the coast of the city of Mar del Plata, the construction of a major new cultural program for the city is proposed. It allows us to imagine a new centrality , forcing the presence of a milestone towards more residential areas, thus proposing the metropolitan consolidation of Mar del Plata. The proposal in this regard demands attention through a building with a strong public character, with a large dry "dock" overlooking the sea, and a naked and robust materiality in its built volume that frames an access and exhibition plaza. The museum as rocks of a breakwater facing the sea looking at the city from a distance. The scale of the project is a vision of the city itself, its size, its vitality, and the efforts made to locate it as an international city with cultural events. The urban environment and above all, the natural environment, we think requires us to think of the new museum at the scale of a large metropolis .

Museum

To this end, we designed a museum that could house prestigious art exhibitions, and with regards to this we decided to maximize an exhibition area as spacious, luminous and flexible as possible, which in its configuration offers a spatial richness that allows us to imagine this building as a clear reference in the cultural activity of the entire city and surrounding area.

Thus, the exhibition areas were located on a high floor to take advantage of the great spatiality available, and the ability to illuminate them from above, forming a large diaphanous volume as a contemporary exhibition area. In its expansion, the museum offers a clear separation of typologies of use keeping the exhibition room with overhead lighting typology for visual displays on the upper levels, and incorporating large flexible "warehouse" rooms on the ground floor, ready for mass entertainment events with separate access on the outside, or smaller isolated rooms for different audiovisual exhibitions.

Pedestrian Scale

The entire program beyond the exhibition rooms is on the ground floor, in direct relation to the sidewalk, access, the pedestrian and neighborhood scale of the surroundings. This decision suggests a ground floor open and transparent in terms of its program, while the upper floor is predominantly solid.

Module

This search for a great spatiality inside and a defining volume from the outside is contrasted with the idea of maximum flexibility and constructive rationality of a cellular building.

A system of independent structural modules, which ensures that each of these can be completed in itself, allows the building to open with only 2/7 of the total building completed. A building with modular growth provides great flexibility for the developer to have large variations in the stages of completion, as this is a building with an open functional structure.

Each of these modules corresponds to each of the exhibition rooms of the first stage. Four cubic modules made of exposed concrete structure and enclosure make up each of the modules. A central module with the same spatial treatment acts as a hall towards all the rooms, allowing a maximum configuration for an exhibition, where an exhibition occupying all rooms can be easily organized. This "panopticon" space becomes a central component of the project by allowing to multiply the functional and spatial relationships, allowing us to think of the exhibition room area as a single large area.

Materiality

Structurally and constructively independent, these concrete volumes take advantage of the inertia generated by the blind walls of the rooms to create overhangs and large lintels forming a structural system with few support partitions, reinforcing the idea of the open and public ground floor, open to the city . This constructive decision results in a very low maintenance in the life time of the building.

The interstitial spaces between the volumes are capitalized as an exhibition space with an unexpected environmental quality, by providing views outward through a system of metal walkways and glass roof and panels to the outside. These interstitial circulations provide great depth to the spaces and rooms.

The project proposes an intervention directly on the shore as a continuation of the characteristics of a public square, emphasizing its perspective as an urban landmark position.

The spatiality, flexibility and quality in the way that contemporary art is on display is achieved by a modular system of large volumes with a convincing image and functionality.