Overall contextual view with park. La Cidade das Artes, Barra da Tijuca, Brazil. Architect: Christian de Portzamparc, 2014.


The Cidade das Artes is situated between the sea and the mountains, in a plain, on which a new and major district of Rio de Janeiro has been built – Barra da Tijuca. The building is a small, raised city organized around a terrace ten meters above ground, floating upon a public park – a tropical, aquatic garden designed by Fernando Chacel. This terrace is a public space; it is a gathering point that gives access to all of the facilities, where you feel like you’re in Rio’s great landscape, with a view of the sea, the lakes, and the dancing line of the mountains. Cidade das Artes brings together a wide variety of spaces: a concert hall, which is unique anywhere in the world because it can be converted into an opera house and a theatre, a performance space for chamber music and popular music, movie theatres, dance studios, numerous rehearsal rooms, exhibition spaces, restaurants, and a media library. The Cidade das Artes resembles a large house, a great veranda above the city – a tribute to an archetype of Brazilian architecture. Between the two horizontal plates of the roof and the terrace are set the large curved concrete walls that contain the halls in an interplay of volumes and voids. This is another version of the open block – hollow but made out of assembled layers. The architecture frames and echoes the beautiful curves of the Sierra Atlantica Mountains and the line of the sea. For train travelers arriving from the north zone, it will form the entry point to Barra da Tijuca on Ayrton Senna Avenue.


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Photo credit: © Hufton+Crow-VIEW / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No

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