TEXT

The project for the expansion and renovation of the Juan B. Castagnino Municipal Museum of Fine Arts has been conceived through a constant back-and-forth between the whole and its parts.

The new proposal recognizes and develops from the longitudinal axis that structures the current building. This axis, rotated 45 degrees with respect to the city grid, is the Museum’s most important urban feature in terms of its relationship to context, and just as it has always defined the identity of the historic building, it also defines the current expansion project.

Formally, the expansion proposal is based on the repertoire of regular, orthogonal spatial sequences found in the existing museum, achieving a harmonious continuity between both. Likewise, it continues the volumetric stepping strategy that characterizes the current building, reworking it both in section, to allow a lower, more welcoming scale relationship with the plaza, and in plan, to set back the new lateral wings at the front, thereby emphasizing the traditional, symbolic institutional façade.

The plaza retains its current character, improved in its relationship to the new building, with slight sidewalk extensions in the area of the existing esplanade and the opposite corner. Particular care has been taken to minimize the removal of trees, providing in those specific cases for the possibility of transplanting them within the budget allocated to the building.

Starting from a detailed analysis of the existing building’s conditions and the urban fragment in which it sits, each individual decision for the new building has been arrived at through a process of continuous verification of the relationships between the proposal, the existing structure, and their ultimate synergy.

The proposal has been gradually refined, resolving programmatic constraints and preexisting conditions, arriving at a solution that is carefully worked yet apparently simple, carefully inserting the expansion to preserve as many existing trees as possible, without competing with the existing museum but without subordinating itself to it either, without mimicking it but without contrasting with it, seeking a final, balanced and integral resolution of the whole, harmonious among all its parts.

TEAM

Diego Arraigada, Gerardo Caballero, Agustina Coulleri, Florencia Meucci, Luciano Navarini, Sofía Rothman, Victoria Fucksmann, Pablo Gamba, Florencia Sobrero, Mercedes Paz, Joel Perez, Franco Casaccia, Guido Picasso y Guido Greco.