Words by Francesca Perry
A major new contemporary art museum has opened in Cáceres, a historic city in western Spain’s Extremadura region. Designed by Tuñón Arquitectos, the Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear has been built to publicly exhibit artworks by more than 500 international artists – including Jenny Holzer and Anish Kapoor – which acclaimed gallerist Helga de Alvear has collected over 40 years.
De Alvear established a non-profit arts foundation in Cáceres in 2006, housed in Casa Grande, a palatial building from 1913. The new 5,000 sq m museum brings together this building, the restoration of which formed the first stage of the project, with a major new extension clad in white reinforced concrete, housing spacious exhibition halls.
Words by Francesca Perry
Rotterdam-based Casanova + Hernandez Architects has completed a large-scale public realm redevelopment project for the Albianian fishing village of Shiroka.
Located on Shkodra Lake, near the border with Montenegro, the village has a long history of small-scale fishing and handmade crafts such as carpet weaving. Due to unregulated post-communist privatisation of public space over the past few decades, the village’s waterfront had become crowded with haphazard private developments and parking areas.
The project from Casanova + Hernandez, named Albanian Carpet, restores an open and inclusive public space along the waterfront, united and enhanced by decorative paving in black and white granite with patterns that reference the local design heritage of Albanian carpet weaving.
Words by Francesca Perry
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be a somewhat stressful experience spending time outside in cities, as pavements and parks become crowded with people and social distancing becomes a challenge. For those mostly confined to home, getting out and about should be a source of wellbeing, but it can prove the exact opposite.
With this in mind, Zeller & Moye – an architecture practice based in Mexico City and Berlin – designed a single-person outdoor structure for urban public spaces that is intended as a kind of sanctuary: open to the sky and the ground, but protected from the busy hustle and bustle of the city. Triangular in form and covered in semi-transparent mirror film, the structure – called Halo – functions also as an eye-catching, mysterious urban intervention, akin to a public artwork.
Words by Francesca Perry
Rome-based practice Alvisi Kirimoto has designed the new Camerino Academy of Music, in the central Italian town of Camerino. The new structure replaces the old academy building which was seriously damaged in 2016 when a series of three earthquakes devastated the local area. This is the third project to have been completed since the earthquakes, forming part of the strategy to revive the area.
Alvisi Kirimoto collaborated with the local architecture and design studio Harcome and the engineer Paolo Bianchi to realise the project, which was constructed in only 150 working days and financed by the Andrea Bocelli Foundation.