Pedro Gadanho & a.s*

Ellipse Foundation Art Centre – Estoril/Alcoitão

(Continuación)

Pedro Gadanho

a.s* Atelier de Santos

Fotos: Daniel Malhão

Fotos: Paulo Seabra

Art Center Ellipse Foundation
Cascais, Lisboa - 2005-2006

Arquitectura:
Pedro Gadanho, arquitecto, com a.s* Atelier de Santos (Pedro Costa, Célia Gomes)

Colaboradores:
João Simões, Ricardo Balhana, Ana Teresa Henriques

Consultores:
Promomento, Fernando Rodrigues / ARA , Pedro Gomes / GAU, Madeira da Silva

Constructor:
Mundipinta, Lda.

Área de Construcción:
3150 m2

Texto original en inglés::

The Ellipse Foundation Art Centre, inaugurated on the 22nd of May 2006, is a 20,000 square-foot converted warehouse in Estoril/Alcoitão, designed by Lisbon-based architect, free-lance critic and curator Pedro Gadanho. He created ten exhibition rooms, storage and specific areas that house not only exhibitions but also different activities like educational services, artist residency programs and special projects.

A non-descript warehouse in the outskirts of Lisbon is turned into a container and exhibition site of contemporary art. For this, an elementary strategy is devised: the several scales, dimensions and characteristics of the show rooms must have diverse conditions, adapted to the several modes of presentation that characterizes the most recent artistic production.
A succession of these situations would also create a narrative path.

A multifunctional hall converges into a compressed passage. The entrance is done through a meeting lounge that dominates visually the hall and the exhibition space.
The first space of the gallery acts out as a great hall that can exhibit installations of an exceptional character and, at the same time, it makes sure that the rest of the exhibition circuit is well distributed.

The chromatic succession, ranging from the hall’s black to the great hall’s white – punctuated in the transition spaces by grey and orange – is repeated in the superposition of two exhibition rooms right in front of the entrance.
The dominating theme is, therefore, the opposition of black box and white cube.

Pedro Gadanho, September 2006

Pedro Gadanho divides his activity between architecture, criticism, curating and teaching. He uses projects, exhibitions or writing to produce critical thinking on the relations between architecture and contemporary culture. He teaches at FAUP and between 2000 and 2003 was one of the directors and curators of Experimenta Design, the Lisbon Biennial. Amongst many other exhibitions, he curated Metaflux, the Portuguese representation at the 2004 Architecture Venice Biennale. His designs include Passos Manuel Cinema-Bar and Presença Art Gallery in Oporto, and the recently published Orange House, in Carreço.

a.s* - Atelier de Santos was established in 1997 by Célia Gomes and Pedro Machado Costa. It is a collective of architects based in Lisbon. The Student Residencies in S. Miguel, the Ribeira Grande Museum or the Central Library of the Azores University stand out amongst their realized projects. The latter was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe European Architecture Prize and selected for the FAD Architecture Prize in 2004. Their work has been widely published and exhibited both locally and internationally, namely in the Venice Architecture Biennale, in the Iberoamercian Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism and at the Architectural Association in London.