REGIONAL MUSIC CONSERVATORY, VILA REAL In five hundred and eighty years the troubled ground of the Convento de São Domingos was also a Hospital, a Military base, a hostel, a cine-theatre… arriving to the present day substantially ‘lived in’. The new guest is now the Music Conservatory. It is flanked between the more archaic west facing façade and the east facing one, scenographic and urban (rebuilt in the XVII century). Without any evidence of the old cloister (confirmed by the ancient water wells found on the site), the south façade is new and parallel to the aisles of the church. It’s sufficiently close to invent an intimate patio, and sufficiently distant, in an austere language, to yield prominence to the old stones.
The west façade was returned to its one time coarseness that used to face the rural fence. The east façade was silenced, at the avenue level, punctured only by the vaulted tunnel, becoming the passage and threshold of silence. The program is organized in the linear sequences of rooms and the simple stratification of the levels. Multiuse Auditoriums on level 1, public and studio on level 2, classes on level 3 and administration on level 4. The lengthened circulations build, in an obvious geometry, an abstract, slow, monastic, tranquil space… Radically interrupted by voids of uncertain motive… Laid bare by the external history. Action and contemplation cohabit. There are perilous disputes. Between the dominant horizontality of the weightless light and the overwhelming optic verticality. There is isolation and expansion. There is melancholy and shadows. Light governs the spaces. A physic-light, not meta-physic. A tactile-light, that flatters the instant. That fuses memory and forgetfulness.
