Kengo Kuma’s Swooping Canopy Reorients Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon

The extension to Lisbon’s Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian (CAM), designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates, orients a much-adored park and cultural complex in a different direction. This singular foundation—established by the will of oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian and today one of the world’s largest in its endowment—first acquired a swath of the city’s Santa Gertrudes Park in 1957 to build a museum for the display of its patron’s highly curated collection of pre-modern art. The design, by a trio of Portuguese architects—Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid, and Alberto Pessoa—brought art and nature into immediate proximity within a Modernist pavilion, which contained two internal gardens, and windows that frame the plantings like artworks. Lisboans flocked to this cool refuge set amid laurels, eucalyptus, and poplar.

So successful was it that, in 1983, the foundation built CAM at the opposite end of park to exhibit modern and contemporary art.