The Foundation is engaged in the preservation and popularization of the creative heritage of the prominent Brazilian artist Ibere Camargo, therefore, the building, first of all, will play the role of a museum for his works.
It sits on a narrow, elongated stretch sandwiched between a hillside and a motorway and overlooks the river. Due to the lack of space, Siza had to build a vertical composition of his exhibition space: the halls smoothly flow into one another, forming a total of three levels around the central atrium.
The ramps connecting them, going from the interior to the outside and returning back, and the plastered white concrete of the walls evoke inevitable associations with the Wright Guggenheim Museum, but Siza avoided the "compulsion" and isolation of the New York building in his project: in the building in Porto Alegre, all the rooms are simultaneously dismembered and connected in a general dynamic composition, and the visitor does not for a second forget about the river Guyaba, which is very close by, as the architect himself says: the views of it open from the windows of the museum.
During construction, the townspeople criticized the Foundation's building for the lack of panoramic windows that would allow them to admire the landscape in full, but "framing" it in a bizarre shape of openings only emphasizes the beauty of this natural landscape.
Rejecting the monochrome interior, Siza used light wood for the flooring. For lighting, sunlight is widely used, penetrating into the halls through glass ceilings.
Along with the actual exhibition space, the Foundation's building complex includes one-story buildings of art workshops, and in the underground floor there is a small auditorium, a storeroom, archives, as well as a parking lot located under the highway.
The vibration of space and form, the sculptural beauty of the volumes, perceived both from the outside and from the inside of the building, distinguish this building from a series of other remarkable museum buildings in recent years.
