Sinuous Filter

MOdAM - Museum and School of Fashion. João Luis Carrilho da Graça, Camillo Botticini, Stefano Ferracini

The MOdAM project is conceived as a pavilion in the park, an osmotic element that, despite being intensely urban, integrates with the surrounding open space, becoming a necessary component and the central element of the park’s design.The suspended enclosure multiplies the park’s levels, integrating the required functions into a dimension that transcends the spatial categories of inside and outside, creating a temporal and spatial continuum across the various functional levels. The architecture results from the interaction of three foundational conditions: identifying the theme, rationalizing and optimizing the functional program, and contextual insertion. The functions are spread across three main levels, separating the spaces dedicated to the Museum, located on the underground level, from the Fashion School on the elevated level, with the primary intention of uniting and facilitating interaction between the common functions within a single space at the park’s level. This choice refers to aspects with broad urban implications, such as the relationship with the park, particularly to the northeast, and those with the interventions planned by the Fashion City Plan.

The predominantly horizontal development of the volume contrasts with the verticality of the surrounding buildings, rebalancing the urban composition and acting as a physical link between the park and the Fashion City. A central element of the architectural approach of MOdAM is the characterization of the ground floor at park level, which is almost entirely open, transparent, and without boundaries.The arrangement of the glass elements allows free movement between the paved spaces, providing access to the Museum, the School, or simply leading to the park, which, in a Corbusian manner, entirely maintains its surface thanks to the "suspension" of the School’s volume. The ground floor of MOdAM is conceived as the main distribution point, housing common spaces where everything happens and everything is visible.

In this free layout, the visitor identifies a large distribution axis that organizes the different uses: the Museum entrance, access to the School, and the starting or ending point of a walk through the park. The light that vertically penetrates the building creates a system of visual relationships between the inside and outside, between covered and uncovered areas. In these vertical margins, the building can be fully perceived. From the balcony of the classrooms, a privileged spot reserved for students, the gaze travels and intersects along the building’s section, crossing paths with the visitors on the ground floor and reaching the gardens of the Museum’s patios on the underground level. Open-air staircases within each patio connect the different floors, creating a suggestive synergy of use that reaches its peak during the summer months. These paths, oriented according to the routes established in the park’s design, serve as escape routes and provide an additional point of integration with the context.

The sinuous movement of the roof, associated with the sculptural idea of a body delicately resting on the park, encloses within it the response to spatial requirements related to ceiling heights—higher in the technical laboratories compared to the classrooms. The same undulating effect is repeated in the underground level, where gentle slope variations stimulate the Museum’s exhibition path and address, as in the School, specific needs concerning the essential heights of different spaces.