Cylindrical vision.A commission to build an auditorium and gallery inside a car park ramp in Portugal tests the architects' ingenuity. Eduardo Souto de Moura's skill in reconciling, then transcending, inherent contradictions was seen in his conversion of a ruined monastery into a luxurious hotel, the Santa Maria do Bouro at Braga (AR July 1998). Vision and an equally supple intelligence inform the design of a gallery and auditorium built, remarkably, inside a spiralling ramp to a rooftop car park. The ramp itself, beside a shopping centre in Matosinhos, north of Oporto, is a graceful concrete structure with the external edge of the coils rendered white. It wraps itself around a tall cylinder 22m high and 2m in diameter. Given the cylinder's form and dimensions, the rooms could only be placed one on top of the other. So it was logical to put the auditorium, which required privacy and no light, on the ground floor and the gallery above. The two are connected by a skeletal metal and wooden staircase, hidden in the auditorium behind a screening wall. To minimize reverberation, the cylinder is lined internally by an absorbent absorbent /ab·sor·bent/ (-sor´bent) 1. able to take in, or suck up and incorporate. 2. a tissue structure involved in absorption. 3. a substance that absorbs or promotes absorption. lattice of rough bricks with open joints; for similar acoustic reasons, auditorium furniture has been placed in the middle of the room. As in previous works, Souto de Moura expresses the quintessence quin·tes·sence n. 1. The pure, highly concentrated essence of a thing. 2. The purest or most typical instance: the quintessence of evil. 3. of material and texture -- in this case the intricate chain-mail texture of the brick wall and grain of wooden floors, stair treads and auditorium screen. Light is an active element of the design. A domed white ceiling above a circular clerestory clerestory or clearstory (both: klĭr`stōr'ē, –stôr'ē), a part of a building whose walls rise higher than the roofs of adjoining parts of the structure. reflects luminance The amount of brightness, measured in lumens, that is given off by a pixel or area on a screen. For example, dark red and bright red would have the same chrominance, but a different luminance. into the gallery; at night, because of its scale, the room is lit by street lamps. Both rooms, but particularly the gallery with its great height and luminosity luminosity, in astronomy, the rate at which energy of all types is radiated by an object in all directions. A star's luminosity depends on its size and its temperature, varying as the square of the radius and the fourth power of the absolute surface temperature. , possess the austere simplicity of a chapel. It was not yet in use when the photographs were taken, and the only decoration was provided by the sun casting a crescent of light through the clerestory over the unadorned wall. In the midst Adv. 1. in the midst - the middle or central part or point; "in the midst of the forest"; "could he walk out in the midst of his piece?" midmost of noise and traffic, the architects have created a remarkable and tranquil place. Architect Eduardo Souto de Moura Eduardo Elisio Machado Souto de Moura (born on July 25th 1952 in Porto, Portugal) is an architect. Moura currently lives and works in Porto where he has built several internationally acclaimed buildings. , Oporto Project architects Eduardo Souto de Moura, Nuno Graca Moura, Pedro Reis, Joaquim Portela, Sergio Koch |
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