nMAC | ACCA_Buenos Aires New Contemporary Art Museum - International Ideas Competition (2012)
Size:
8,500 m²
91,493 ft²
Design:
2012
Program:
Contemporary Art Galleries, Temporary Gallery, Restaurant, Auditorium, Photography Gallery, Entrance Hall, Gift Shop, Loading Dock, Restrooms, Offices
The project was an open, international ideas competition
Images:
The building site is ideally located where the Avenida de Mayo axis (East to West) and along the Milla Museos (North to South) intersect. The puente de la Mujer bridge by Santiago Calatrava is to the left of this image with the Fragata Sarmiento (historic ship museum) to the right.
Entrance to the museum is through a series of liminal spaces which set up an ambiguous condition of arrival. There are three separate entries into the Urban Gallery or the New Museum of Arts and Culture (nMAC – Nuevo Museo de Artes y cultura). These entrances locate major cultural icons within the city. The main entrance to the building is through the opening at the puente de la Mujer bridge, which leads into a vast space, eroded by the cultural flows within the city.
The gallery spaces are formed between the interior requirements of the gallery program while always contested by the exterior space of the city. The relationship is one of balance and symbiosis where both gain advantage from the others presence. They are linked in a dance as two partners moving as one, but expressing separate identities.
The circulation inside the new Museum of Contemporary Art (nMAC - Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo) passes through an exterior court volume that can be understood as both curated interior gallery and exterior space of cultural production; blurring the line between the two and producing new programmatic synergies. The formal, organizational systems express the distinction while finding new hybrid conditions of form, program and experience.
Image supplied via the ACCA competition and shows the beauty of the local context. The site is to the right, just beyond the Calatrava bridge and is ideally located between the city center to the right and the Reserva Ecologica to the left.
Drawings:
Models:
Sketches:
This sketch followed an initial digital sketch model where the idea of separate volumes led to interesting programming options. The separation allows for entry, exterior gallery spaces, public performance spaces, and non-traditional programming opportunities.
This section shows the potential of the exterior Urban Gallery to become formally active by allowing controlled access to upper level spaces. The shaded galleries could be locked after hours and would allow for other revenue opportunities, allowing the museum flexible and sustainable funding strategies.
Longitudinal section looking at the relationship between the vertical, tubular elements which organize exterior courtyard spaces and the relationship in plan to the skylight pattern.
Sketch testing the formal resolution of the exterior courtyard spaces with the overall building form. Conceptually the form could encourage airflow as a possible means of passively cooling the exterior spaces.
+SUM: (Behind the Scenes)
+SUM is a way to show residue of the design process over the course of the project, or to show how the designs continued beyond the final solution. The image shows a render during project development looking at the eroded surface of the exterior and its relationship to the exterior courtyard spaces (orange) and skylight apertures.
The image shows a render during project development looking at the eroded surface of the exterior, the building envelope, and some of the exterior courtyard spaces (orange). The courtyard space in the forground is where the "Interior Circulation" rendering is located. (see "Images" link above)
The image shows a render during project development looking at the eroded surface of the exterior (both roof and Urban Gallery) and its relationship to the exterior courtyard spaces (orange) and skylight apertures.
This image shows the topographic geometry of the eroded exterior space, which were defined by two multi curving surfaces negotiating program, circulation, lighting and view in order to achieve the final form. These elements (shown in teal) were the positive forms that left behind the voided / eroded surfaces. They may appear uncontrolled at first glance, but were developed through an iterative process to achieve a high degree of local, technical specificity.
One of a series of post competition experiments where the digital model was used to find new forms of expression via 2d graphic compositions. The compositions allude to larger organizational and formal rules that both represent and extend the operational strategies of the project and reopen the project to new conceptual territories.