The Serralves Foundation in Porto, Portugal, has shared photos of its recently inaugurated new wing designed by and named for the country’s beloved Pritzker Prize-winning architect, Álvaro Siza.
The 45,000-square-foot expansion is the fifth building designed by Siza for the foundation after the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art (1999), Manoel de Oliveira Cinema House (2019), Gardeners’ House (2021), and the restored Serralves Art Déco Villa (2021).
"With a wing dedicated to the Permanent Collection and Architecture, the Serralves Museum is more than ever an institution where the present is fully activated and where the recent past is settled and decanted. It allows the institution to fully take responsibility for its history and legacy, as well as for its role as the leading institution in Portugal dedicated to the history and the present of contemporary art and culture," Director Philippe Vergne stated.
The new wing was realized in Serralves Park to the western side of the existing museum building, which connects to it via an elevated walkway. It is meant to house not only the Serralves’ expansive collection of art but also as a showcase for the display of architecture — which it says forms part of its "strategic axis."
The project took approximately 18 months to execute and culminated this past December in a new building that is wonderfully in dialog with the rest of the structures he planned for the campus, extending a relationship with the foundation that dates to 1991.
Standing to the side of its older neighbor and deeply integrated within the park's landscape, the bold yet deliberately non-imposing building is accessible via an entryway placed at the corner.
Its form exhibits a linear production of spaces contained by a jagged runaway volume when viewed from above. Inside, the galleries are arranged into three floors that add another 44% of exhibition space in the two upper floors, while another 75% worth of storage areas are created in its basement. Siza says his intention was for the design to be an "expression of natural growth" resembling a tree branch that is also equally rooted in the park's natural setting.
In terms of the materials used, Siza chose reinforced concrete for the structural walls, which are then trimmed in granite wainscoting and plastered on the outside with cork insulation before being painted white and finished internally with double plasterboard.
The Foundation says the growth metaphor latent within their latest addition also celebrates the "global influence" of Siza’s work, an archive of which was donated to its permanent collection in 2014.
An exhibition of that archive titled C.A.S.A. will be put on display upon its February 24th public opening. Another exhibition titled Improbable Anagrams and taken from the museum's holdings and special collections, will stand side-by-side until August 24th this year, curated by Vergne and his colleagues.
"This museum deserved to overcome the limitations of space that constrained its capacity for artistic dissemination," the Foundation's CEO Ana Pinho said finally. "And that's what brought us here: This building represents a new milestone for Serralves while paying a well-deserved tribute to Álvaro Siza — one of the greatest names in the history of world architecture."
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