Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.For a couple of decades, British architects appeared to be obsessed with stepped or terraced buildings. These were megastructures with ziggurat profiles, often apparently inspired by Italian futurist architect Giuseppe Terragni’s vivid and unrealised imaginings. The craze lasted from about the mid-1960s until the early 1980s and manifested itself in London in everything from social housing to grand public buildings such as the British Library in King’s Cross. But its last major appearance was, oddly, in Lisbon, where English architect Leslie Martin designed the Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM), a step-profiled museum on the lush, green campus of the Gulbenkian Foundation.Designed as a museum of contemporary Portuguese art, the building was already a little unfashionable when it opened in 1983, stuck between late modernism and high-tech. The terraced profile created a lofty, almost industrial exhibition hall, but the CAM building always felt anachronistic, particularly compared to the elegant Gulbenkian across the park. Now the building has been dramatically and deliberately flipped around, excavated and added to by Kengo Kuma, Japanese architect of the V&A Dundee design museum in Scotland. Where a house and its walled grounds once blocked the way to the CAM, now a new landscaped garden has opened up the site to the city, greatly expanding the public park. This is all good. The benefits of the most visible architectural gesture, however, are less clear cut. Kuma has lined the long side wall of the museum with what he refers to as an “engawa”. You may be familiar with the concept, if not the word; it is the covered space that runs along the sides of a traditional Japanese house, outdoors but still beneath the eaves. It is a place where you might sit and watch the rain or chat to guests on a warm evening.As you approach the new museum entrance from the landscaped gardens with their meandering paths, it is this engawa you are confronted with, a 100-metre run of walkway covered by a pagoda-style, white-tile-clad roof. But this is not the entrance; that is around the side. Instead, you are led to a blank white wall. In its familiar incarnation, the engawa is domestic in scale, creating a modest space that extends the interior, a buffer zone between room and garden. Here, though, this vast canopy is grossly overscaled and has nothing to do with the interior. It is not, as Kuma calls it, “an in-between” space because it does not mediate between interior and landscape; rather, it is an autonomous structure, more like an attenuated pavilion. This is a problem of inflation. All architecture has a scale and blowing up an element to suit a larger context does not mean it will work in the same way. This is, instead, an insanely expensive covered walkway which solves a non-existent problem. If the path ran more directly to the entrance it could have been avoided.The new entrance, under a double-swooped roof which seems to drape over its V-shaped columns, is a lofty, glass-encased lobby, airy and an enormous improvement on what was there before. It gives access to the retained and restored original Leslie Martin gallery as well as to a large new subterranean gallery below. The other architects entering the design competition in 2019 proposed a new gallery building with the potential of natural light. Kuma elected instead to expand the gardens and bury the gallery. This has led to a very fine, shady landscape and a mediocre gallery: a large black box (albeit painted brilliant white) with a stingy trickle of light from the covered walkway and grille above.Otherwise the new building is clear and useful; the circulation is improved, there is an abundance of public seating and high-level windows create a connection to the landscape which is genuinely transformative. Martin’s original space has meanwhile been wonderfully filled by artist Leonor Antunes (to Feb 17 2025) with a selection of works from the collection and some of her own which reference Martin’s partner and wife Sadie Speight, an active collaborator in the practice who was, in the way of these things, mostly written out of the histories. But the project is haunted by the building on the other side of the park. The Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, designed in the 1960s by Ruy Jervis d’Athouguia, Pedro Cid and Alberto Pessoa, is among my absolute favourite museums. A Brutalist building set in a seductive and well-used public park, it is a masterclass in the meshing together of architecture and landscape and in creating a quiet, reverent calm. The galleries, dark and understated, are enlivened by glimpses of green and the more public interiors constantly open out to the gardens, the canteen, the library, the lobbies, each suggesting a continuity. For me its architecture looks as contemporary and luxurious in its materials and its generosity as any I have seen. But its relatively small scale also creates an intimacy which is wholly lacking in the CAM designs (as it is, frankly, in most contemporary public architecture). All those white walls and white expanded mesh create the clinical white cube so beloved of curators but less so, I think, of artists.The problem seems to me to lie in a very particular contemporary conception that museums must be open and welcoming and, to do this, they must be huge and visible and create vast and vague new interstitial areas which are neither quite inside or out, as if these will be read by the non-museum going public as “welcoming”. This is not, I think, how things work. Rather look at the gardens around the old Gulbenkian, always full of picnicking students, idlers and strolling grannies. There is an intense fear of appearing elitist which drives institutions and architects to obsessively and performatively create oversized public features, caricatured in scale, cartoonish in their obviousness. The presence of the Gulbenkian across the park demonstrates clearly that progress in architecture is not a given.gulbenkian.pt/cam
