Mario Toral Museum Competition

To conceive an exhibition space that would also serve for the production and display of art — where artists, students, and visitors would gather — we decided to create a space capable of narrating the process of creation and production, in a morphology that would take the site's variables as founding axes. We envisioned a building that would function as a unit composed of fragmented, autonomous elements, where creation operates separated by strata from exhibition.

In a first stratum, we created a semi-buried, permeable, and chaotic level, where a complete dialogue takes place between exterior and interior, and all activities intermingle. Here visitors can see how art is created, while artists and students can learn and create within a large collective space. This is the level where the land, the people, and all the variables come together for the creation of art.

In a second stratum, we created a level composed of three hermetic volumes, within which the dialogue occurs internally. These volumes are the containers for the building's programs, where the already-created content is displayed or exhibited and the visitor enters exclusively to contemplate. This program sits above ground level, on a permeable, translucent platform, expressing that what is exhibited is something that has already left behind the earthly and the mundane to be placed in an elevated position — one that must be journeyed to in order to be contemplated.