A Square in Summer / PROMONTORIO – 【Architectural CAD Drawings】

Architects: PROMONTORIO
Location: Praça do Império, 1449-003 Lisboa, Portugal
Area: 2150.0 m2
Project Year: 2018
Photographs: Francisco Nogueira, Eduardo Montenegro

Curator: André Tavares
Client: CCB (Centro Cultural de Belém)

Text description provided by the architects. To commemorate the 25 th birthday of Vittorio Gregotti’s Belem Cultural Centre, —Lisbon’s main art centre—, Promontorio Architects were invited to create an architecture installation built out of piled-up blocks of recycled cork agglomerate that also functions as an outdoor cinema during the city’s warm nights.

The project is devised as a combination of two open-air spaces defined by an incomplete double colonnade, evocative of a ruined structure which stands at the junction of the cultural centre’s main square. Two spaces of ‘dwelling’ open to different appropriations, one of which is an outdoor cinema. The project evokes both a poetic ideal and the irrevocable condition of the passage of time in architecture; an installation whose presence in space is intended to let visitors playfully meander through this promenade as an engaging architectural experience.

The project also celebrates the aesthetic singularity of this agglomerate, 100% recyclable and produced from the bark of Queues suber, a species familiar to the Portuguese, but very rare and special in other places in the world.