Museum for Iberê Camargo Foundation
Fundação Iberê Camargo in Porto Alegre, Brazil, requests a building to house the archive and exhibition of their collection. The defined site is bordered on the north by Padre Cacique Avenue and bounded on the south by a cliff which rises from 5 to 24 meters.
The proposed programme includes spaces for exhibition, storage, library and video library, bookstore, cafe, small auditorium, but also administrative offices, and artists' workshops.
The building base is constituted by a long platform, 0,60 meters above the avenue level, under which are located part of the programme areas. This platform is accessible from the avenue walkway by a ramp.
The principal volume is carved out against the cliff vegetation, occupying its concave space, and results from the superposition of four floors with an irregular form, including a ground floor at the platform level. This volume is delimited by a straight and almost orthogonal wall on the south and west, and by an undulating wall on the north and east.
This undulating wall, which rises the entire height of the building, delimits the access atrium, which is surrounded by the exhibition halls (an equal sequence, on the three floors above, of three rooms of varying dimensions) and by the reception, coatroom, and bookstore on the ground floor. Permanent and temporary exhibition spaces are not differentiated, opting for a flexibility appropriate to the actual functioning of museums (the collection of the museum itself makes temporary exhibitions of different themes).
The halls of all the floors can be opened onto the space of the atrium, or closed by moveable four-meter high panels, allowing natural light from the atrium and between this height and the ceiling.
The rooms of the last floor receive natural and artificial light from skylights made up of double-paned glass, accessible for cleaning and maintenance.
The atrium receives light by a skylight located on the terrace and by exterior openings on the undulating wall.
The vertical accesses (two elevators and two sets of stairs) are situated at each extreme end of the sequence of the exhibition halls. Also included is a system of ramps, with slopes of between eight and nine per cent, which develop partially in the internal atrium and partially in the external spaces, creating closed galleries, surrounding the volume of the building, ocasionally opened by small spots onto the beautiful landscape and by skylights.
