To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Vittorio Gregotti’s Belém Cultural Center, Lisbon’s principal art center, PROMONTORIO was invited to create an architecture installation, built with piled-up blocks of recycled cork agglomerate, that would serve as an outdoor cinema during the city’s warm summer nights.

The design combines two open-air spaces bordered by an incomplete double colonnade, evoking a ruined structure that stands at the junction of the cultural center’s main square. Two plazas lending themselves to different uses, one of them a cinema al fresco.

The project also celebrates the aesthetic singularity of an agglomerate which is 100% recyclable and produced from the bark of Queues suber, a species familiar to the Portuguese but very rare and special in other parts of the world.

Both a poetic ideal and the irrevocable nature of the passage of time in architecture are evoked in an installation whose presence in space is intended to let visitors playfully meander through the promenade and engage in an alluring architectural experience.