Hosted by [AC-CA], the results were recently announced for their New Contemporary Art Museum competition. With the aim of a design for a new art museum in the heart of the city, Shelby Ponce & Eduardo Ponce took the first place award, which successfully engages and establishes a cultural dialogue with the urban fabric surrounding it. As the capital of Argentina and located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, the city is an important economic center. Its architecture is a combination of different styles which gives it a unique architectural beauty. More images and information on the winning proposals after the break.
1st place: Shelby Ponce & Eduardo Ponce Description:
A large portion of the site has been given back to the city, in form of a waterfront art garden, by lifting its two end sides. This gesture serves to create cultural, urban spaces all around the building, activating the site and connecting (physically and visually) the East and West side of the museum. Visitors are greeted with arts program information, a garden environment, installation art and outdoor events; becoming aware of the culture and changing into a different mind frame before entering the building.
How do you create a building that serves more than a solution to a functional problem of housing and displaying art? Museums are often introverted buildings, not seeking more than to be spaces for art but failing to engage and establish a cultural dialogue with the urban fabric surrounding it. The Buenos Aires Contemporary Art Museum seeks to draw people in by extending the park and the city’s culture within and throughout the museum, blending exterior and interior exhibit spaces, and creating a seamless experience between the context of the city and the art world.
BACAM is organized in layers – public programs at the ground level, performance, digital, and sculpture art within the second and third levels, and artwork sensitive to direct light at the fourth level. The building’s skin and spaces of the new BACAM are both impressive and transparent – a combination of gallery spaces, structure elements, circulation, and semi-transparent facade filter light throughout the museum and provide views (in all directions) of the Puerto Madera Waterfront, the District, and beyond into the Metropolis of Buenos Aires, allowing visitors to reconnect with the surrounding and distant landscape.
The structure of the building has been designed to have minimal impact on floor space, creating a series of open, flexible gallery spaces that will successfully accommodate the wide range of scale often found in contemporary art museums, and which can easily adjust to showcase installations, performance art, sculptures, paintings and many other art mediums.
An large outdoor terrace offers the visitor to experience outdoor art, performances, and events from a unique setting – overlooking the river and the city – breaking the monotony often found in art museums and further extending the public waterfront into the building.
2nd place: Matías Pereira & Marco Podestá Description: A new museum, a new building, a new window in the city of Buenos Aires overlooking the coastline o Puerto Madero District. Modifying the skyline of Puerto Madero District, a new contact point is created between the center of Buenos Aires and its coastline. The new Museum of Contemporary Art is constructed inverting the relationship between the full and empty spaces along the construction line of Puerto Madero District.
The new building is erected along the coastline creating in its interior an empty space. The new Museum of Contemporary Art is built as an urban space for the general public, and does not generate a space for the exclusive use of these people who are only interested in visiting a museum. The opportunity to make a new building in the central area of Puerto Madero District becomes one of a new space for the city.
3rd place: Takuya Omura & Takahiro Aoyama Description: Buenos Aires achieved dizzy economic growth in the South American city. Puerto Madero district is known as waterfront and is an area where redevelopment progresses especially in Buenos Aires. However, the redevelopment project disregards circumference environment, for example a skyscraper is built next to the huge wetland designated as the Ecological Reserve by the Ramsar Convention.
And it is in the state that architecture and circumference environment were divided. Then, the architecture we propose is acting mutually rather than dividing architecture from circumference environment, and aims at forming an attractive city. In this proposal, we set two outlines that we call an inner outline and an outer outline, and the “blank space” which exists among those outlines is laid out in three dimensions. And we propose that to incorporate the grace and generosity which nature has in architecture and circumference environment.
For more information about the competition, please visit here.
