At the turn of the 20th Century, Parque Mayer in Lisbon, Portugal was a thriving center for performing arts – playing host to the city’s golden age ‘revista’ theater and ‘fado’ music scenes. In recent years, however, the area has fallen into decline with its theaters left vacant or under-utilized. The project aimed to breathe new life to Parque Mayer via the reactivation and refurbishment of the existing theaters and through the introduction of a wider variety of cultural and leisure activities to the area.
Parque Mayer is located in the heart of Lisbon (outlined in white), accessible from the city’s primary thoroughfare Avienida de Liberdade. The site shares a border with Lisbon’s botanical gardens. Residential neighborhoods lie to the north and south.
The project was intended to incorporate approximately 50,000 SM of new cultural and mixed-use space, including three theaters for the performance of revista drama, cabaret, fado music, etc., and the transformation of the existing Capitol Theater into a 1,100 seat multi-purpose venue. Using our familiar color massing blocks, we studied the various ways the desired program might be distributed. We arrived at a conceptual master-plan that located shops and the smaller theaters around a refurbished Capitol Theater.
We created a series of floor-plate models – each representing the different program spaces. We planned to provide an amphitheater which would bring activity to the western end of the site and help to reinforce the pedestrian connections between Parque Mayer with the adjacent botanical gardens.
The refurbishment of the Capital Theater would also include the addition of a gourmet restaurant on the roof and modernized back-of-house spaces below grade. These new areas would be incorporated into the final floor-plate models. In addition, two mid-rise residential towers and a casino-hotel would be located at the northern and southern edges of the site, directly accessible from the adjacent neighborhoods. Together with the refurbished Capital Theater, these taller structures would create a visible ‘skyline’ for Parque Mayer.
We built a larger scale model to further study the public spaces. Vignettes from the model were documented and presented to the client in the form of a photographic matrix. These photographs were then used as an important tool to better understand how the scheme related to the human scale; and to further refine our design.
The theaters were further studied with larger scale interior models. Collaborating with Japanese acoustics expert Yasuhisa Toyota and the French theater consultant Ducks Sceno, the design team developed a series of ideas for each theater intended to create versatile spaces able to provide a range of experiences for audiences.
Our design intention had been to let the new architecture of Parque Mayer grow out of its existing context and derive its energy and vital animation from the emerging synergies between the development’s mixed-use programs and the revitalized theaters. Although the project was cancelled as a result of the recent economic downturn in Portugal, it represented an important milestone for our work at the office.
The projects in this section were designed and executed during my time at Gehry Partners LLP (the office). I am grateful to Mr. Gehry and the team at the office for their generosity and support over the years. All intellectual property rights of these projects continue to be owned by the office unless otherwise mentioned. The narrative texts on the projects are entirely personal, they do not represent the views or opinions of the office, its clients or any other third party or organization.