Competition Entry / Site Art Center
with Borys Kozłowski
Cascais, Portugal


Once an isolated alarm point, disabled of its function as time went by have fallen into a state of decay. A derelict fortress appealing to imagination, filled with meanings is searching its potential future.
The basic principle that describes the proposal holds the intention to highlight to an extent the quality of the current experience and create additional ones within the fortress. At the same time to define its location as an attractor point in a relation to its surrounding context.
Project’s design aspects negotiate the manipulation and construction of concepts that deal with the horizon, ruin and mirage. As the linearity determines the site, the experience of viewing the horizon sets the framing of the view. In addition, to render the importance of the fortress’s value, refused of any kind of material restoration its conceptual reconstruction is taken into account. While the visual indifference of current situation is resolved by optical disruption of reflective surfaces.
By orchestrating those conditions in an intervention, the introverted structure that became a ruin by tangible results of the passing of time is reused again as a cultural promotion centre.