Pietro Tentori . Carola Magni . + ArkxSite
Pietro Tentori and Carola Magni winners of the ArkxSite Site Memorial competition.
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Studying the site the feature that drawn our attention the most was its special relation to diverse and strong landscape elements as Tejo river, its banks, the 25 de Abril bridge and the ocean in the far distance.
The idea is to create a new viewport of Lisbon that distance itself from the typical up-to- bottom view of the city that you usually have from a lot of panoramic points all over the city.
The objective is to have an horizontal element that brings you far enough to flip the visitor’s point of view into a bottom-to-up perspective.
Our intention is to design in one unique act an item that can reenact a relation between the city landmarks and the spectator through a new visual connection.
THE PROJECT:
The geometry of the proposal is the result of an external circumference and an organic shape concentric to it, which hides in itself an hypogaeum space, which brings the visitor through a path that involves a dynamic proximity to both water and land.
While walking the external path, which starts on the east side keeping the existing bank height level, the visitors’ proximity to water is constantly changing.
There are two strategical moments, the first one faces the bridge while the second one stands towards the ocean, when the path rises and widens itself creating a broader platforms that allows the visitor to have an exclusive perspective on the surroundings from the middle of Tejo river.
Consequently there are two moments when the path lowers itself; once in proximity to the water at its farthest point from Tejo’s banks, which it’s also the narrowest moment, and once more on land to give direct access to the hypogaeum.
Here the History Room is placed as a generous and flexible space, giving the possibility of hosting multiple events as exhibitions and conferences.
Regarding the relation between our proposal and the existing site, the intention is to increase the green space as much as possible. Therefore we redesigned the existing street, that currently links the parking lot to the main road, moving it next to the tracks in order to surround the project by a park that has exclusive access to pedestrians and bikers.
