The Côa Museum is a project of Camilo Rebelo and Tiago Pimentel who won the conquest among other 41 national and international proposals and used GOP technical assistance. The project of the two architects lies on an enormous concrete monolithic with a texture which is similar to the local xisto, half buried on the top of a hill, being this way integrated in the landscape.
The building is composed of four floors, organized in special system of vertical and horizontal circulations. The ceiling has foot circuits of access to the museum and places for parking. It also has great panoramic areas. The direct connection to the Atrium is made by two lifts and stairs.
On the ground floor there is a ramp corridor that’s circundates all the building, where the permanent exhibition of the museum and the rooms of the temporary exhibitions are situated. At the end of the first stretch of this ramp gathers a node of connections: to the interior of the museum, to the administrative area, the parque and Côa museum, to the under floor where the restaurant the cafeteria and the auditorium are.
This building has many features: it faces real adverse weather conditions, it is quite isolated and it has difficult access which made it hard to dig and create all the surrounding logistics.
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The structure in concrete with the estereoctomia of schist stone of the area was one of the challenges of this project and succeeded after several studies with molds of glass fiber.
The construction process consists of a concrete structure with some mixed slabs.
The stereotypy made of panels with 60, 90 and 20 m large. The museum pavements are in micro concrete, the frames have spans of a small reasonable size and the slide windows are made of a special opening system.
