Salvador Dali Temporary Museum by LIKEarchitects is a small ephemeral museum placed in the central space of a shopping mall in Lisbon, designed to welcome the exhibition of one hundred drawings (woodblock engravings) inspired by Dante’s “La Divina Comedia” by the painter Salvador Dali.
The musicological space, encouraged by the well-known poem’s close-fitted structure composition (guided by the symbolism of number 3), is distributed in nine inter-connected rooms, organized through three thematic wings – Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The voids – or the “gates” that free up the visitor’s passage between rooms – appear every time when the two walls intersect – the casual corners – leaving the wall central area for the exhibition of the artwork, and then allowing new possibilities of path for the exhibiting itinerary. At the same time, the absence of cover reveals, from the upper galleries, the entirely temporary museum’s organizing scheme.
The exhibiting structural walls, guided by the Surrealism driven by the Spanish artist, emerge transfigured and assume an irregular stratification, luring the visitor to a surreal and fragile world. Composed by superimposed layers of white styrofoam with different masses, the walls design a stripped and unusual materiality, defined by the successive horizontal lines of variable thickness that assume changing shadows during the day. The thick and dense pavement, in a coconut fibber carpet, contributes for the creation of a moment of rest in the mall, assuming Salvador Dali Temporary Museum as a drive for escaping from the daily frenzy.