Architectural Essence
2014 Venice Architecture Biennale

Buildings embody architectural essence when they are both situated and experiential. The spirit of our search to create architectural essence by embedding our art museum, Centro de Artes Nadir Afonso, within its locale, both temporally and spatially, is the focus of our architectural installation in the Time Space Existence exhibition at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale.

A large-scale three-dimensional voyage through the physical space of the Centro, enhanced by a 100-year historical time-line and related companion audio by New Republic Architecture critic, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, are at the core of the exhibit. Like the art museum itself, it is an adventure, that response to the curatorial focus of the 2014 Biennale through the ‘lens of both the tradition of the situated modernist Portuguese architecture and the global contemporary notions of landscape, sustainability, affective experience, and public participation with aesthetics in the design of cultural institutions