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Portico and entrance of Lisbon's art museum

October 2, 2024

Kengo Kuma Designs a Sculptural Addition to Lisbon’s Centro de Arte Moderna

The swooping tile- and timber-clad portico draws visitors into the newly renovated art museum.

By: Giovanna Dunmall

Photography: Fernando Guerra, Canon Ambassador

When the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon launched an invited competition in 2019 to refurbish and expand its Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM), all the participating firms proposed extending the 1983 Leslie Martin–designed building. All except Kengo Kuma, that is. His eponymous Tokyo-based firm, Kengo Kuma & Associates (KKAA), proposed going underground instead. Given the modern art gallery’s location, in the foundation’s 8.13-hectare park, which is beloved by locals for its multitude of leafy pathways, framed views, water features, lawns and hidden nooks and crannies. Out of the 12 proposals submitted, KKAA’s design consumed less precious green space.

The architects were immediately tasked not only with expanding the space available for art, but also creating better circulation within the building and, most importantly, better connections between the museum and the city. Up until then the museum’s windowless back wall, which was cluttered with back-of-house equipment, marked the end of the site and formed a hermetic boundary with the southern side of the city. Now, and after the foundation purchased the 86,111-square-foot plot of land between the museum and the road beyond, the entrance has been turned around.  Now, there are views through to the north garden as visitors walk in the glazed entrance. An inviting new garden and large public plaza outside the gates draws people in from the city. The stone from the previous forbiddingly high 15-foot boundary wall on the southern end of the site has been used to create public seating along the edge of the public plaza.

entrance to a museum
image of a building amongst trees

A Museum in a Garden

“When we visited the site, we immediately knew the garden should be the protagonist of the project,” says Kuma, when I spoke to him at the museum’s opening. “We chose to create an in-between building, where people can feel and see the gardens but still be in a protected space,” he says. The result is a swooping canopy based on the Japanese idea of an engawa, or sheltered walkway that not only shields the exhibition spaces within from the harsh southern light, but also becomes a “room” in its own right. There are also beautifully framed views of the garden from underneath it as well as from the museum’s new partially underground gallery with its line of clerestory windows.

The canopy is over 328 feet long and 50 feet wide, and another smaller canopy swoops in the other direction over the entrance. The new portico is clad in ultra-thin ceramic tiles above and dehydrated ash below, both sourced and produced in Portugal. According to Kuma, the portico works as both an anchoring point and philosophical metaphor for what a contemporary museum should be.

“Our concept was freedom, openness, and transparency,” he explains. “You can do anything in the engaw—have big parties, lectures, art exhibitions. It’s also a place for people to rest, relax, and meditate.” And the sort of space that is sorely needed post-COVID he adds, as well as “a bridge bringing nature and humans together.”

photo of an art museum

A Poetic Landscape

This theme of connection and continuity is also embedded in the ethos of Vladimir Djurovic, whose firm VDLA Landscape Architecture, was also part of the competition bid. “This garden is a little masterpiece, and the foundation has been nurturing it for over 50 years,” he says. “When we won the competition, I just wanted to continue what had already been done.” The original hard-angled modernist design was by landscape architects Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles and António Viana Barreto. Over the years, the garden became softer, more organic and poetic explains Djurovic as it has bedded in and been restored and upgraded, most recently by Telles himself in 2002. “The mystery and the beauty of the garden came out as it evolved over time.”

By planting indigenous species, the landscape architects say the garden will become almost entirely self-sustaining in just a few years. Just like Ribeiro Telles and Viana Barreto before them, they have created curved pathways, water features and more intimate areas as well as a large central gathering place with a pond for people to congregate. Referencing the concrete slabs that abound in the older part of the park and provide stepped access over water, Djurovic used organic-shaped granite slabs around the engawa as it is more durable. The signage, bins and edges of the planting are made of corten steel that will, again, require very little upkeep. As soon as the CAM reopened last weekend locals were queuing in droves. They had clearly missed the building but now it is not only brighter, bigger and far more accessible, it comes with an extra segment of lush informal garden open to all.

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