Productora Project

A perimeter of auxiliary spaces is organized in direct contact with this central exhibition space. On two sides the secondary exhibition areas are situated. One side is reserved for the activities of the museum staff: offices, the museums workshop, archives, storage, etc. On the last side a large foyer connects both entrance patios and gives access to the public spaces: cafeteria, library, auditorium, educational workshops, bookshop, etc… All these areas are illuminated and ventilated through vast green patios that are cut out of the landscape.

2. An invisible museum. Museum architecture tends to every time more expressive, daring and loud. The idea to build a museum hidden in the desert’s topography seemed like an attractive alternative. After the international impact of for example Bilbao’s Guggenheim by Mr. Gehry or the recently opened museum in Wolfsburg by Zaha Hadid, we thought of a construction without façade or silhouette: a building absorbed by the landscape, hiding a mysterious space inside, almost like an Egyptian tomb. We imagined a labyrinth space lit by patios and roof lights. From the outside the museum can only be perceived as a series of excavations or triangular surfaces breaking the existing topography: an abstract composition in the Peruvian landscape.

Since the museum has – for the moment – no specific location, it has been projected on a virtual plot along a highway entering the city. The car parking is located on the other side of the road. The museum is accessed by two underground passages which form an introduction to the museum and end up at the entrance patios (these can contain temporary installations, video projections, etc…). We conceived the whole museum as a relatively low tech structure to be able to build it with local knowledge. Almost the whole museum is organized on one level to eliminate costs for personal and freight elevators. Air-conditioning and further acclimatization is minimized by housing the museum underground where temperature and humidity level are far more balanced then in the open desert of Peru.

And finally this museum represents an ambition. Not only the wish to create a dialogue about a true centre for contemporary art in a metropolis such as Lima, but also it translates our desire to build an architecture of spatial mystery and delight. An architecture that refers to forgotten pasts, but generates new experiences. A desire to leave – like a Nazca drawing – a trace in the desert. A manifestation of contemporary culture and architecture.

Productora is an architect office based in Mexico DF

Approached from a curatorial viewpoint, it’s interesting to see the white cube of the LiMAC as a platform for in situ interventions. The repetition of a same scheme, varying the scale of the cubes, provides a continuous play with the inside – outside concept. It forces to rethink the notion of the promenade architectural, or on the contrary, it finds in its labyrinth network the equation of order.

Every exposition is a map. Therefore, it does not only separates, defines and describes a particular place, emphasising it’s principal characteristics y significant points and omitting or simplifying others, but also represents the territory according to a certain method of projection. In the case of the LiMAC, the prominence of the space interconnects with the tissue of relationships; sometimes impeding, sometimes encouraging – depending on the ability of the curator – the storyline established between the projects.

The autonomous rooms inserted into the central cube don’t have to join necessarily the concept of spatial divisions required by expositions. The system of fragmenting the space in as much regions a artists or expositions, was a well functioning method during the seventies, but with the disappearance of defined movements, the heterogeneity of contemporary proposals and the ‘no- specialization’ of the artist towards the media he uses, a connecting thread for the exposition proposals became more and more necessary. If I think of the LiMAC as an active space that opens its doors to a broad variety of artistic explorations, it might the ideal scheme to establish connections. Every ‘room’, in its fragmented form, serves to create a continuous space, differentiated spatially, that connects to the other ‘rooms’ by corridors. These, however, should not be understood as open gaps, but rather as an integral part of the exhibition, providing longitudinal, transversal and diagonal visions.

With the LiMAC you could also choose to play the game of ‘curatorial power’, but in this case it is not about selecting one option above another and excluding work from the museum space. It’s about blocking the spectators view, about what is directly visible in the ‘main ring’ and what stays hidden in the ‘rooms’ of this museum. What is exposed in the open area and what remains hidden in the interiors. This could give place to micro expositions. To individualized macro expositions.

It’s a big curatorial challenge to accept this geometrical grid that initiates with a wood of columns and converts into an ensemble of independent units. However, despite the radicalism of this mathematical fractal, the rules of the game seem inexhaustible.

Obviously the LiMAC is a utopia on paper, and while it maintains itself on the edge of existence, it can not fail. This way it continues to serve as an ideological arm (the necessity of a museum of contemporary art in Lima), and at the same time it maintains it’s secret spirit, like an underground quote written in the desert.

Ruth Estévez (Bilbao. 1977) is art critic and independent curator. Her work is oriented towards the study of artistic interventions in public space. 

2. In the early seventies, to present a museum of space or to present the space of the museum as itself, might not have been such a revolution. The Museum – heavily influenced by the spatial principles and interests of its era’s artists – presented itself in the first place as collection of spaces organized by an intelligent set of architectonic elements. I recall that the splendid museum design of Hans Hollein in Mönchengladbach was conceived as an intricate organisation of big cubic spaces and rectangular hallways arranged through a rigid set of columns. This project preceded the discussion about the desired appearance of museum buildings. Distracted by this discussion, one can hardly grasp that the quality of the project lays in its spatial organization. The particular facade design of the building takes all the credits. PRODUCTORA understood this problem and realised that the only possible way to answer to the contemporary status quo on museum architecture was to make the architecture of the(ir) museum disappear. The architecture of the LiMAC museum is not there. It is not visible; you can only be in the architecture. The museum is again presented as a spatial organization.

3. The project presents an act between carving and constructing. In fact the best way to understand the architect’s train of thoughts and the design process is to analyze first the preliminary museum design in which different definitions of space by architectonical elements are proposed. This first variant of the project shows the definition of the spatial types and helps realizing that the second project – this project – is a further development of these. The project is merely a refinement of the different spatial sensations and organizations developed the first project. The trick introduced by the architects is to organize all the different spatial types in the size gradient. This re-organisation intends to turn the museum into an open field with different directions. It gives a concept that glides from an open space with columns into a collection of rooms. I tend to believe that even the field with the columns contains a set of rooms. Implicitly, the typology of choice is the room. Thus the design becomes a clear reaction against the museum as a recognizable icon or a logo for contemporary art. The LIMAC brings us back to the essence of the museum architecture by contemplating the different options of containment: the museum as a receptacle of art.

Kersten Geers (Gante, 1975) is architect and architecture critic. Together with David Van Severen, he runs an architectural practice ‘Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen‘, based on the conviction that architecture should be consciously projected from the notion of its obstruction.