The project proposed by estudioHerreros organizes its program around three pavilions that house exhibition spaces, a permanent sculptural installation, and different spaces for exchange. The three volumes are linked by a large roof that blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior, in a search to integrate the surrounding natural landscape into the centre, proposing a new concept of a museum that includes interesting outdoor spaces, an open, more playful and interesting way of sharing and experiencing art.
The roof filters natural light into the centre spaces thanks to translucent domes, located between the steel beams that form the grid. Thanks to the industrial character of the exposed steel beams and the effort to integrate the installations naturally, the usual solemnity associated with the entrance and tour of museums disappears at the MALBA.
It is an elegant and innovative piece of Miesian character, a creative space for art.
MALBA PUERTOS by estudioHerreros. Photograph by Cecilia Gil.
Project description by estudioHerreros
«The Estudio Herreros project was born from the desire to broaden the cultural and social impact of the Museum on new audiences. It also stems from the need to host new forms of expression and exhibition in keeping with the XXI century museum, in which disciplines and formats are increasingly hybrid and interdisciplinary, and the visitor is an active participant in the work of art.»
Eduardo Costantini, founder of the MALBA museum.
MALBA PUERTOS, the new enclave of the capital institution in Escobar, is not a conventional museum but a set of architectural and landscaping actions that aim to build a center of gravity for the artistic and cultural life of the northern area of the Province of Buenos Aires. In MALBA PUERTOS, three interests come together that are inevitable for understanding the future of the present: art as a mechanism for asking questions about the contradictions of the times we live in; the fragility of nature as the foundation of our relationship with the world; and attention to communities whose history must be rewritten, often ignored by the most orthodox cultural environment.
Faced with such a request, the architecture of Estudio Herreros, with the complicity of Bulla in landscaping, FloraEstudio in the industrial production of the equipment and Torrado Arquitectos as a local studio, could not propose a "building" with urban reminiscences that was orthodoxly delimited, hierarchical, with a well-connected route; even the idea that we have of a museum was inadequate for an enclave that wants to be more a place of random stay than of orderly visit. That is why Malba Puertos is a transparent, porous, democratic construction, which dilutes its limits, in which exhibition is mixed with learning, archival work with indigenous cultures, the interior with the exterior until, because it does not have one, it does not even have a main door.
MALBA PUERTOS is the superposition of three exhibition models that go beyond the conventional museum and that do not often share a project: an open-air sculpture circuit that seeks to associate the surrounding urban enclave with contemporary art and to draw attention to the incalculable value of the natural reserve of the lakes; a geometric forest that frames a plantation of alder trees whose clearings act as open-air exhibition halls; and a set of three pavilions and three squares that form the heart of the project that deserves a more detailed description.
A large roof of 2,500 sqm rests on three pavilions that contain: an exhibition hall with a small bookstore and design shop (600 sqm), a deposit of works of art that can be visited with an educational space and a café (500 sqm) and a fully glazed volume that houses a permanent sculptural installation by the Tucuman artist Gabriel Chaile (350 sqm). The pavilions are prisms of light construction with a repetitive perimeter structure of steel supports and opaque parts of concrete panels. Their simplicity and isotropic condition, a certain industrial character and the effort to naturally integrate the visible installations, dilute the usual solemnity associated with the entrance and route of the museums.
The large roof is made up of a grid of full-web steel beams crowned by a sea of translucent domes that shed their enigmatic light on three plazas, one open to the city, another to the lake and another to nature, which have the vocation of being exhibition, stay and programmable places, from markets to performances, passing through open-air cinema, exhibitions or parties. The architecture creates the space and the infrastructure that makes possible the multi-format miracle that extends into the natural corridor of the "Forest Rooms" that contains the aforementioned three open-air exhibition spaces surrounded by alder trees.
The ritual of “visiting” a museum becomes “inhabiting” the ambiguity of the space, open or closed. Children and adolescents are the group to which the center’s programming is most focused. For them, architecture makes the art deposit, usually hidden and mysterious, accessible, in the idea that they understand the importance of an artistic collection that is a living chronicle of their own history; and a space equipped with the appropriate technologies for training activities that include collective actions, screenings, conferences, workshops, etc., is available, in addition to the intensive programming of the spaces under the large roof.
MALBA PUERTOS is a manifesto on the institutions of the XXI century and how to rely on the transformative capacity of architecture to expand artistic practices to all social groups, breaking down any elitism.
