Casa dos Cubos by EMBAIXADA arquitectura is a reconversion of a former rundown infrastructure that plays a relevant role in the social and urban context of the city of Tomar (Portugal), although without any particular architectural interest.
The new program comprises two distinct areas: a public area for exhibitions, meetings and cafeteria and a private area consisting of lecture rooms and accommodation for invited artists. Confronted with the regulation plans, the design maintains the entire external perimeter construction, while its rundown interior is totally scooped out.
Therefore and due to the functional program, the new construction establishes itself as the anatomy of the existing building. A new architectural body that runs throughout the available space, de-multiplying tectonically the finite interior into a new series of places and programmatic situations.
The private areas are volumetrically defined within the structure and optimized for inhabitability. Each with its own access, atmosphere, identity, shape, use and dimension. The social life, exhibitions and meetings take place in the interstitial space around the new structure, and are characterized and organized by the programmatic events defined by the enclosed spaces.
The spaces “born” from a visceral symbiosis and from the tension between this architectonic organism and the physical limits that keep him in captivity. The existing building acquires a new interior reading, being reconfigured and transformed in a unitarian and hermetic space with the use of white mate paint and mate epoxy resin coating.
For the organism that contaminates the interior it was created and developed a kind of skin. Through some kind of alchemy a substance was developed, a recipe, by conjoining some “ingredients”: dark pigment, acrylic resin and reflective glass spheres. The entrails of this animal were painted with glossy white paint and with glossy epoxy resin coating. A new interior within an interior interior. A machine capable of producing space, installed in a shell that was progressively deflated and then insufflated with a new and strange form of life.
Images courtesy of EMBAIXADA arquitectura
Discover: www.embaixada.net
