Marie Pirard
Bridges Museum in Oporto, Portugal. ISA Saint-Luc Liège (Belgium)
Oporto is the city of bridges ; these are numerous and the most famous is the « Ponte Luis » from the disciple of Gustave Eiffel.
The project is situated in front of these, at the bottom of the hill, behind the houses of the most tourist embankment of Oporto which go along the Douro river. The site is exceptional for a museum of bridges because the disproportionate scale of the « Ponte Luis » offer an interesting sight.
To install this museum, I prolong an automobile tunnel, by recovering it by a structure integrated into the project, to find a surface on which the museum is built then. For that, I use various thematics present in the site : layers climbing on the hill, prop wall, linearity, pedestrian network in three dimensions, hanging garden…
A stage of structure (wall-beams) and technical rooms is dissimulated behind the « prop » wall ; we can also find there the cafeteria-restaurant and the temporary exhibition (interactive relation with the restaurant) in the bridge direction.
The entrance and the permanent exhibition are just above, connected to a public place joining the various ways from the bottom and the top of the site.
The lengthened volume in front contains the second part of the permanent exhibition with a point of culmination towards the Luis bridge and the room about Oporto, city of bridges. The organization is based on actual crierias of museography : continuous wire (conductive wall, footbridge), visual breakthrough, fixed reference marks (patio…), nuance of spaces (large-small, open-closed…) (like the difference between the two levels of the permanent exhibition),…
The more private parts of the museum (areas of teaching, press, research and direction) are located at the back of the site and in the volume overhanging the hanging garden (social control)…
SCHUNCK cannot guarantee the correctness of content and expression. The participants themselves are responsible for their entries. The copyright of the projects underlies to the authors, any reproduction or use of the shown material is strictly forbidden.