Tandanor Performing Arts Center

Sweeping forms and an attention to horizontality serve to create a potential new coastal landmark for Buenos Aires, Argentina in the proposed Tandanor Performing Arts Center by MONAD Studio. The building draws its generation from pedestrian movement patterns, latent local relationships existent upon the site and from the building’s relation to the urban scale. Sighting the distinct yet uninspired vertical icons to be found in the Buenos Aires skyline, the new cultural landmark seeks to counterpoint this trend, instead creating a new ‘augmented horizon’. The architects describe the Center as,

offering in contrast a predominantly horizontal organization characterized by oblique connections between public programs, activated by spatial trajectories along gradient surfaces of urban mediation.It is meant to consolidate a series of auditoriums and large public venues for music performances, operating to articulate the internal relationships of rhythmic massing proliferations, providing a shift of attention towards horizontal, public, coastal developments.

Courtesy of MONAD Studio

The Center’s program is layered. The inner spaces will hold a series of auditoria, public foyers, and great halls, while the outermost later boasts rehearsal rooms, workshops, a boardwalk with restaurants, and various retail and leisure attractions. These sweep along the building form as it assumes the echoed figure of an old shipyard. In describing the Performing Arts Center and its relation to the city, the architects state,

There are important historical and functional issues operating at an urban scale of this magnitude; the base material consists of the existent network of urban relations at the site itself so that the new Performing Arts Center operates directly from within the landscape conditions to activate new three-dimensional relationships, integrating and re-invigorating existent ones in order to form a network of built form that pulsates with particular scalar rhythms and sequences. The site as generative material is de-objectified and re-mixed to uncover latent local relationships that can help to anchor what could otherwise be perceived as alien forms.