Sweeping statement: Extension to the Centro de Arte Moderna in Lisbon, Portugal by Kengo Kuma and Associates
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KKAAs extension to Lisbons Centro de Arte Moderna is a gesture that bears no relation to theexisting building or the older museum across the gardensI am not sure if there is a better museum than the Gulbenkian in Lisbon. It does something a little unexpected from a brutalist building, creating an intense sense of intimacy, comfort and luxury. It is a building as much about the landscape as it is about the exhibits, wrapped in lush gardens which are always made visible and often accessible. The busy, cheap public canteen with its green terrace is a wonder of contemporary culture, crammed with local office workers and museum visitors alike. Its interiors still feel much as they must have in the mid1970s, with their original furniture; bespoke leather chairs, tubular tables and the often extraordinary applied art of ceramic and metal and wood all survive entirely intact. In the years since its opening in 1969 it has matured and settled in a way brutalist buildings, for so long labelled as arrogant and disregarding of context, are not really supposed to.Designed by Portuguese architects Ruy Jervis dAthouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa, the building is low rise, complex and elegant, embracing the landscaped gardens rather than imposing itself on them. A rough contemporary of the Hayward Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn in Washington DC and the Whitney Museum in New York, it is nothing like any of them. The architects were clearly very aware of the international scene (despite the relative isolation of the authoritarian Salazar era) yet this building is more delicate, considered and less selfconsciously monumental than any of its peers.The British architect Leslie Martin had been intimately involved with its genesis (alongside the brilliant Italian architect and designer Franco Albini), retained as a consultant during the competition process and beyond. When it came to building the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM) on the site, it was Martin himself that the client the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation returned to. Dedicated to modern and contemporary art, this discrete institution built across the pond in the same garden was envisioned as an extension of the foundations cultural complex. Reviewing the building in the AR in September 1985, Patrick Hodgkinson wrote that the presence of each building is subservient to the concept of the whole in the Gulbenkian Garden.The CAM was completed in 1983, mixing brutalist influences with hints of the then burgeoning British hightech. It consists of a massive concrete frame with a stepped steel structure slotted into it, introducing a series of clerestory windows that are expressed in a series of terraces. With a pool and draped, slightly ineffectively, with greenery, it resembled a provincial UK university campus. It could look like a late echo of the Terragniinflected housing popular in London in the 1960s, such as Neave Browns Alexandra Road and Hodgkinsons Brunswick Centre, but while those buildings aimed to create epic public spaces at their centres, Martins onesided effort somehow lacked a sense of purpose or urbanity. Unlike its neighbour, it was never a masterpiece.Nevertheless, as a gallery for contemporary art, it provided the lofty, welllit spaces that the Gulbenkian did not, so it fulfilled its brief, and a decade or so after its opening it had become clear the CAM was a rare and genuinely popular piece of public architecture in an era when modernism was being questioned and often reviled. Four decades later, the foundation purchased the additional land on the southern tip of the garden, between the CAM and Rua Marqus de Fronteira, and in 2019 it launched a competition to remodel the building, add gallery spaces and propose a cohesive new whole with the landscape and surroundings.The main move of Kengo Kuma and Associates (KKAA) is, they say, the introduction of an engawa, the interstitial space in a Japanese house that separates interior and exterior while belonging to both. Since it lies beyond the homes paper walls and is not covered by tatami mats, a traditional engawa is deemed outside space, yet it is always contained within the structure, beneath the eaves and inside the outer perimeter delineated by timber posts similarly to a loggia, porch or verandah, it is a place where you might sit and watch the rain, or chat to guests on a warm evening.Kengo Kuma, seen here atthe CAMs opening in September 2024 (above), won the competition with the concept of the engawa atraditional space in Japanese architecture that belongs to both the inside and outside of a buildingCredit:Chronicle / AlamyThe Japanese architects claim that the engawa defines the spirit of his extension is a oneliner that exposes the superficial and globalised nonsense which constitutes the essence of a great number of competitionwinning schemes. Architects, understanding that they will have limited time and means to catch the attention of judges, have become adept at appropriating an architectural element, motif or concept which is easy to explain and illustrate, and which establishes a clear identity for the project. If, as in this case, it can also point to a cultural connection, so much the better the small seafaring nation has form when it comes to Japan, as the Portuguese were the first Europeans to open up trading relations with the then still very much closed society of Japan in the 16th century. It is a kind of trick, a diversion tactic, a way to place in the mind of the jury a spurious connection, an architectural mnemonic and exploit it. KKAAs engawa is clad in white tiles tiles are the defining element of the Portuguese facade, but also intimately tied to Japanese craft and ceramics, which the Portuguese imported back to Europe. The connections are established and embedded, the institutional members of the jury flattered and slightly seduced.The trick clearly worked, but the superficiality of the oneliner becomes clear in the built result which is not an engawa, but a huge covered walkway with no real place to sit or stop. Instead of being connected to the existing building, it is an independent structure with chunky Vshaped columns (this is an area of seismic activity), meaning it loses any sense of ambiguity characteristic of the Japanese original. Perhaps most importantly, the engawa suggests a domestic scale while this intervention adheres to the epic proportions needed for contemporary logo architecture once abstracted, it indeed becomes a very elegant new museum logo, designed by Londonbased A Practice for Everyday Life, that is plastered all over the programmes, posters and totes.If the engawa functions as a porous boundary between inside and outside, this broad walkway with its swooping roof butts up against a blank wall. It cannot mediate between building and garden because it is an almostleanto against Martins huge white wall, and becomes a barrier of sorts. Instead of extending exhibition spaces, new galleries were excavated; digging a huge hole beneath the building might preserve the clarity of the competition diagram, but it creates a frankly generic and banal new subterranean gallery space. It is, at best, a black box with a mean trickle of grey light admitted through a grille where a smudge of daylight is allowed through the gap between canopy and wall. KKAA were the only team among entrants who did not propose an extension of the museum into the garden, instead creating a landscape, designed using native trees and flora by Vladimir Djurovic. Considering the Gulbenkians extensive gardens, this was not particularly essential, but a building which refuses to swallow up more of the site is generally appreciated by juries, as gardens have become the puppy dogs of contemporary architectural discourse.With its lofty scale and autonomous expression, KKAAs intervention is not an engawa but an attempt to develop a lighter and well-engineered (if also massively overscaled) architecture as a differentiating device from Martins stolid concrete block. More of a gesture than a response, the slightly awkward confluence of roofs covering the path creates a kind of double drape to announce the entrance. There is a nod here, perhaps, to Sizas draped concrete at the Portuguese Pavilion for Expo 98 but the similarity ends at the conceptual.If the public architecture of modernism has consistently been ridiculed for one thing, it has been the perverse obscurantism embedded in the frequent difficulty in finding an entrance (just think of the Barbican). An era apparently dedicated to public access and a more egalitarian view of architecture has often fallen down in this most basic of metrics; eager to avoid the symmetry, bombast and hierarchy of a monumental main entrance, so many modern buildings went too far the other way. Ironically, it was Martin who overcame the issue most elegantly with his designs for Londons Festival Hall in 1951, by effectively opening up almost the entire ground floor as a glazed public entrance and obviating, even in a symmetrical building, any need for a Beaux Arts hierarchy.KKAAs CAM extension is all about creating a new entrance canopy. For all my reservations, the entrance is far better than it was: generous and light, albeit also glassily generic. The galleries, which had been tucked into the rear of Martins original building, have been much improved in the redesign, with highlevel windows that provide a connection to the landscape. And the gardens, which the burying of the main gallery space enables, are undoubtedly pleasant and will, I am sure, in time, become as well used as those around the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in which a rather curious English picturesque combines with a sort of fauxEastern artifice (all rock gardens and bridges) to create a truly engaging public place.Over the last half century or so, the museum extension has become an architectural typology in its own right. The existing cultural infrastructure of mainly neoclassical and occasionally gothic institutions was seen as a prime target by the modernists. If those big, porticoed beasts represented hierarchy and class, modernism would subvert them through intervention. Tom Wolfe archly skewered Louis Kahns 1953 extension to the gothic of Yale University Art Gallery, an almost unrelieved brick wall in which a few simple string courses were the only expression Kahns justification was that they expressed the floor levels in the building. They were honest, in the way that Egerton Swartwouts Oxbridge 1928 building was not. From IM Peis unlikely success with his Louvre Pyramid to Daniel Libeskinds spiky extensions to Dresdens Museum of Military History and the Royal Ontario Museum, institutions were subjected to all kinds of indignities, some inventive and brilliant, some simply idiotic. In all these buildings, the historical architecture provided something to kick against: grandeur, hierarchical entrances, symmetry, stone, and so on. More modern buildings, which might seem to be easier to extend in a contemporary idiom, actually often prove harder because architecture is still largely operating in that centuryold language. It becomes a kind of selfcannibalisation. All that is left is the sleightofhand, the concept.Credit: Kengo Kuma and AssociatesUltimately, the CAMs refurbishment and extension is a curious lesson in a kind of remote reductivism: the realisation of a concept sketch designed to seduce with its simplicity and its subsequent inevitable collision with the reality of construction. When designed to be globally seductive and transmitted via Zoom, architecture carries all the impersonality and alienation that implies.With its new extension, the CAM has reasserted its presence in the garden, and completes the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundations cultural complex in Lisbon.Credit:LPP / Lisboa Para Pessoas
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