Date: 2002/2005

Location: Calheta, Madeira, Portugal

Area: 6 000 sqm

Client: Sociedade Desenvolvimento Ponta Oeste, SA

Project coordinators:
João Ferreira Nunes, Carlos Ribas

Project collaborators:
Nuno Jacinto, Luis Silva

Photography:
Fernando Guerra
Leonardo Finotti

The new volume of the Arts and Congress Centre has two ways of exposing itself to the world. From the sea and the inlet, as a resistant form, emerging from the headland; and exposing its roofing to the top of the inlet and the whole slope, forming a kind of fifth upright projection, the visible surface of a new equipment, a new form of being and using.

There is an attempt to mark the rupture between the headland and the Centre by the exact insertion of the building, so that our intervention would be essentially the recovering of the vegetal bed in the areas affected by the construction process.

When one descends towards the top of the headland two areas are detached, where the vegetation on the slope to the sea searches to progress. The area around the actual “Casa das Mudas” and the new bodies which appear as surfaces of a solid on a black basis, more than as a roofing, with dashes of circulation and life.

On these “façades” marked by the alignment of the overlay pieces, one can only see obtrusion dashes on the headland, through blocks of basalt and spoil heaps.