Excerpt: The Panteo dos Almeida project by Spaceworkers aims to adapt and requalify the interior of an old church while abiding by the strict rules established by the entities that oversee the modification. For the intervention to not overshadow the historical grandeur of the existing, it had to be entirely reversible and limited. An intervention with an ethereal, subdued aesthetic was taken into account in order to achieve this.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] The Church of Santa Maria do Castelo in Abrantes, Portugal, is a historic building that was built in 1215 by D. Afonso II and later rebuilt by D. Diogo Fernandes de Almeida, one of the project’s main characters, in 1433. This project’s museography and exhibition architecture aims to adapt and requalify the interior of an old church while adhering to the strict restrictions set by the organisations that supervise the intervention in heritage and that do not allow any alteration to the existing other than painting and maintenance of materials.
The intervention had to be completely reversible and minimalist to avoid competing with the historical grandeur of the existing. In order to accomplish this, an intervention with an ethereal, understated aesthetic that would dialogue with the existing and create a virtually open, flowing space was considered. This allowed for the exploration of multiple visual and conceptual connections between the proposal and the existing. Along with defining the hierarchies of exhibition design, it also acted as a church’s interpretive component, giving visitors a fully immersive experience.
The concept took shape in the form of a pine wood platform that was built on top of an existing clay floor and peeled back to reveal a floor that appears to float in space, as if it were a new layer of history. This also allowed people to see the existing floor, which has a different history. The exhibition’s design explores the idea of the immaterial and ephemeral, and thanks to its permeability, the entire breadth of the Church can be seen, creating a kind of augmented reality with additional layers of information overlaid on top of the already present one.
Defying the scale of the place, the proposal assumes different dimensions, rhythms and proportions of the exhibition structures, which are simple, ephemeral, transparent and, which manage with little volume and little material, to communicate with subtlety alluding to the sacred, a simplicity of constructive logic.
The wooden floor supports the metal structures of various dimensions, with glass that varies between 5m, 3m and 2m in height. These are embedded at a depth of 30 cm in metallic pieces, which make the ballast built by wood, support the weight of the structure. The various pieces are distributed throughout the museum space, according to a layout that follows the geometry of the building and takes advantage of verticality and scale.
The lines of light, which run through the entire floor of the museum, elevating the space with an energetic and active vibe, and are repeated in the glass frames that support the graphic elements of the exhibition, play a central role in the entire project.
A thematic exhibition, inside a historic Portuguese church, explores the intersection between an ethereal and minimalist architecture, with an existing architecture that is more than 800 years old, believing that these two realities can coexist and enhance each other.
The proposal aims to guide the visitor along a transparent, immersive, and somewhat surreal path where they can go between layers of information from the past and the present, both of which complement the same exhibition and material. Here, the theme for the entire museographic endeavour assumes that it is some sort of “analogue” augmented reality.
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