MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (Monterrey’s Museum of Contemporary Art) through the department of Education has developed a series of programs for over 20 years that have benefited a great amount of neighborhoods, institutions, schools and companies in Monterrey and its metropolitan area through community interventions with artists, school visits and public art workshops for all ages public.
The aim is to create spaces that can be a starting point for exploration and experimentation where art can become an educational tool for society.
This year -to mark MARCO’s 25th anniversary- several activities were planned, including the project for some temporary pavilions that could work as small classrooms for workshops outside the Museum expanding the range of activities it offers. The project consists in a series of small pavilions that serve as classrooms for workshops and various activities related to arts and crafts, directed for children and young people during the summer.
A series of structures is proposed, designed on a lightweight constructive system of fast execution that can be mounted on the intervention site -in this case the Parque España-, with the potential of being replicated in various public spaces located on different parts of the city in order to provide service to different inhabitants and communities.
It is proposed that the structures be able to hold various replaceable surfaces to be intervened during the indoor and outdoor activities: classes, annotations, textures, texts, paintings, photographs, etc., turning the pavilions into reusable spaces.
After the activities are finished the panels could be repainted to leave a useful space for future interventions, just like is commonly done in museums, galleries and other exhibition spaces.
Dimensions, configuration and roofs.
On the inside the classroom can accommodate a great number of furniture configurations and activities related to the different needs of the workshops that take place there.
The area of the resulting space is designed to be 7.8 m2, or 3.2 x 2.4 m, with a system of folding doors that allow the interior to open up to its surroundings to admit more people, generating a strong connection between the exterior and interior of the construction and also between the exhibited pieces there and the users.
The small plaza created among the pavilions expands the usable area to the exterior. The pavilions open up to it during the day and close during the night to store the workshop materials.
The idea is to generate useful interior space as well as potential exterior and transition spaces with a high degree of relationship to the immediate context creating a metaphor with a small scale city.
The classroom’s interior space would be covered in different types of roofs to give each pavilion its own formal identity since they’re practically equal spaces. The maximum size for these covers does not exceed 3.2 m high since the scale of the classrooms is intended to be as small as possible creating the feeling of a sequence of small rooms for children and youth’s activities while keeping the investment in construction materials to a minimum.
The proposal is to construct the pavilions directly on the floor of the public space that’s being intervened incorporating the texture of the exterior pavement in the interior space.
Materials for the construction of the pavilion were donated by the construction materials company USG Mexico whose construction system was easily adaptable to the times of use and permanence of the project.
We appreciate the support of USG Mexico on the procurement, technical assistance and transportation of materials.
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Project: Pabellones Museo MARCO
Architects: S-AR
Web site: www.s-ar.mx
Location: Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
Project Team: Cesar Guerrero, Ana Cecilia Garza.
Colaborators: Daniela Ambriz, Carlos Valdez, Marisol Gonzalez, Federico Gonzalez.
Program: Pavilions for summer workshops.
Client: MARCO - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (Monterrey’s Museum of Contemporary Art).
Donor Company: USG Mexico.
Construction Area: 23 m2.
Year of Project: 2015
Year of Construction: 2016
Photographs: Carolina Cepeda.
Technical Inspection: S-AR
Construction: Gustavo Rojas & Bros.
Materials: Fiber cement and plasterboard panels, wood.
Constructive System: Lightweight metallic framing covered with fiber cement panels on the exterior and plasterboard panels on the interior, door frames, folding doors and windows made out of pine wood.