Given an awkward site squeezed between an 80-foot-high cliff and a busy avenue, Álvaro Siza Vieira’s design for the Iberê Camargo Museum (ICM) secures the building to its particular setting while reaching out both physically and metaphorically to a larger notion of place and culture. The first building in Brazil by the Pritzker Award–winning Portuguese architect, the museum houses the work of Iberê Camargo, a 20th-century painter who came from Porto Alegre, the city of 1.5 million in the south of Brazil where the museum is located.
To appreciate the ICM, one must understand both its physical and cultural context. Just as its site feels separated yet connected to the town around it, Porto Alegre has a complex relationship with Brazil as a whole. Closer to Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, than to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, it enjoys influences from the entire region. Originally named Porto dos Casais (Couple’s Harbor) for all the married people sent by Portugal to colonize the region in the 17th century, Porto Alegre hosted waves of immigrants from Germany, Poland, Spain, Italy, and other countries during the following three centuries, becoming a cosmopolitan melting pot in the process.
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