The Quadrado Azul gallery was one of the very first contemporary art venues in the city of Porto. Founded in the 1980s on the inititiave of the collector Manuel Ulisses, who had the foresight to invest in artists who are now well-established, such as Alberto Carneiro, Álvaro Lapa, Ângelo de Sousa and Fernando Lanhas. In the early 2000, he moved the gallery to “gallery street”, joining the spontaneous social and cultural movement which developed in Porto’s Rua Miguel Bombarda, carrying on his mission of discovering new talent in contemporary art, such as Paulo Nozollino, Susana Solano, Albert Gonzalo, Ignasi Rosés, Francisco Tropa, Jorge Queiroz, João Queiroz, Arlindo Silva, Hugo Canoilas and Ana Santos, amongst many others. The existing gallery until its current intervention was an anachronistic, albeit functional, space, occupying the ground floor of a long, narrow building, with a back yard. The proposal is based on an empty-shell space which cancels out all existing architectural accidents and transforms the area into a neutral, homogeneous abstraction that affords each artist complete freedom. Built in 5 spatial moments (entrance-nave-skylight-exit-courtyard), the gallery replicates a familiar space for artistic events: the space shrinks from the existing perimeter, liberating the building’s opposing ends which remain unchanged to create an empty box, with an entrance door and a window at the far end. An existing skylight placed some restrictions on the design, determining a subtle downward movement of the ceiling plane towards the light from the landscaped courtyard, enclosed by a yellow wall and framed by a picture-window that epitomises the permanent temptation of the architect to come close to Art.
project:
transformation of
quadrado azul art gallery
client:
quadrado azul art gallery
location:
miguel bombarda street,
porto, portugal
date:
2014 - 2015
building area:
120 m2
architecture:
nuno brandão costa
collaborators:
filipa júlio,
miguel verdasca
electrical engineer:
maria da luz santiago (rs associados)
photographs:
andré cepeda