Fundação Iberê Camargo - Alvaro Siza

There are litterally multiple projects from Alvaro Siza that I could write about here. The Fundação Iberê Camargo, a museum in Porto Allegre (near Sao Paulo) is one of them. The museum is designed for the work of the deceased Brazilian artist Iberê Camargo. The site the building is erected upon was rather difficult: the plot was surrounded by 25metres high cliffs (on three sides). On the fourth side, there was the river Guaíba. But between the museum and the river was a much travelled road, which made the question of how to access the museum a difficult one. On top of that: the plot had a rather awkward triangular shape. Accessing the plot from the top (the plus 25 metres level) didn´t amount to much, mainly because there was no place to park there.
The solution that Siza came up with was sloping path that is part of the facade. Part of the circulation is inside the museum, the other part makes up the expressive face of the museum. From the inside, there are rather small openings cut in these walls, to frame certain views of the exterior. Exactly because of the small size of them, the building creates a tension between inside and outside: too much openness would have made theview on the landscape much less appealing for the visitor. All theis makes for a very sculptural building, which expresses its contents, its plot and its architect, all in unison.