INSIDE OUT
The European Capital of Culture is a city designated by the European Union for a period of one year during which it is given a chance to showcase its cultural life and cultural development. A number of European cities have used the City of Culture year to transform their cultural base and, in doing so, the way in which they are viewed internationally. With the aim of arousing citizens‚ interest and facilitating the long-term cultural development of the city, actions are taken to restore local heritage and create new facilities are as generators for that steady cultural growth and flourishing cultural tourism.
What interests me is the urban development of parts in cities that are in the process of cultural evolution. As a consequence of such evolution, society and city structures start to transform. This process operates with unexploited city parts and revitalizes them so, that they become new attractors (acupuncture urbanism) for cultural development. Therefore the goal is to redesign an urban situation to stimulate cultural development of the city and region‚s cultural tourism. My thesis project is a performing art center fort the city of Guimaraes, which is a town of 160.000 inhabitants in Portugal.
My site is approximately 200 meter away from the historic city center in a 19th century industrial neighborhood.
The program is structured into four volumes that are distributed on the site. The volumes are echoing the scale of the surrounding. This first system follows the perimeter of the site and creates a continuous decisive edge. From the street the building appears as one entity.
Nested within the first system is a second system that defines the interior passage. At the center it is a roof that spans the exterior ball room. From there it divides and creates the inner envelope of the theatre while in the other direction it branches out and inserts itself between the volumes as façade and roofs of the passage-way.
The central space which I call the exterior ball room is a performance space but at the same time it is a covered outdoor lobby for the theatre, the auditorium and exhibition space. The educational part consists out of dance studios and music spaces which are stacked onto three floors.
Both systems share the same structural principle of a steel egg-crate, but the structure is more expressed in the second system.
The outside surface is claded with ceramic panels. In the passage area I use the same materials but with different shades of white ( white to gray). The main atmospheric effect will be the way light and shadow interacts with this surfaces. |
