What interested me was the urban development of parts in cities that are in the process of cultural evolution. As a consequence of such evolution, society and city structures start to transform. This process operates with unexploited city parts and revitalizes them, so that they become new
attractors (acupuncture urbanism) for cultural development.
My thesis project is a performing art center fort the city of Guimaraes,
which is a town of 160.000 inhabitants in Portugal.The main focus was on generating an outdoor public space, an outdoor ballroom, with an interior atmosphere. It is designed as a continuous
space that branches out and inserts itself between the volumes.
The program is structured into four volumes that are distributed on the site. The volumes are echoing the scale of the surrounding. This first system follows the perimeter of the site and creates a continuous decisive edge. From the street the building appears as one entity.
The central space - the exterior ball room - is a performance space but at the same time it is a covered outdoor lobby for the theatre, the auditorium and exhibition space. The educational part consists out of dance studios and music spaces which are stacked onto two floors. Both systems share the same structural principle of a steel egg-crate, but the structure is more expressed in the second system. The outside surface is claded with ceramic panels. In the passage area I use the same materials but with different shades of white ( white to gray). The main atmospheric effect will be the way light and shadow interacts with this surfaces.

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