Civic Garden 1.0
Leiria, 2018
Festival A Porta is an arts festival showing art and performance in unexpected places of the city of Leiria. Located at the heart of the old area, the recent Centro Cívico building was meant to create an open public square and bring a new life to a long decaying area. Despite its best intentions the building has failed to connect to the people and its surroundings and generate the energy that it anounced. Our intervention is meant to reveal this potential of use and appropriation, inviting people to come together and circulate in the beautifull narrow streets that surround it.
To reinvent this empty square we imagined a completely new environment for concerts and performances composed of a soft ceiling and a pop-up garden bellow. The soft floating canopy made of white plastic bands and floating circles made of plastic mesh becomes a living organism, an everchanging screen moving with the wind and reflected by the mirrored facade. On the other end it comes down and tie to the existing column, the only element you can perceive from the street. While the presence of this ceiling added a strong character and confinement to the space, covering the ground with grass and plants allowed us to define the areas bellow for concerts, bars and lounge. The new garden atmosphere revealed a completely new face, one that people can relate to and enjoy.
This project was made with Guilherme Rodrigues, Pedro Augusto, Rui Aristides, Ana Prates, Li Wang and everyone else that collaborated and helped us during construction.
Production by Guilherme Garrido.
Photos by João Gonçalo Lopes and Sal Nunkachov