The repurposed building is located in the historic centre of the city of Coimbra. Its three facades define part of a city block inserted in a dense urban fabric, characterised by narrow cobbled streets and small town squares. The plan for the building was to convert it into a performance venue and a bar . 

The project was conceived to achieve the restoration of the building while keeping its original character, keeping to a minimum the introduction of new elements: the door at the bottom of the stairs, the ticket booth, the curtain separating the foyer and the main room, the bar counter and the stage curtain.
The new performance area has been painted in black, in reference to the “black-box” performance spaces of the sixties and seventies. Unlike what is typical for this type of space, here the large windows to the outside are acknowledged, with plain views of the the two small squares adjacent to the building and the associated street lighting. In the adjacent spaces – the stairwell and the foyer – wood and the colour white set a contrasting tone. 
The various uses of the space (stage, performance space, bar) are characterised and defined by a new set of lighting fixtures that can be configured in a multitude of ways. The definition of the space is further reinforced by the furniture. 
All the floors have been kept in their original condition, bearing the mark of time.

Images:do mal o menos ©

Exhibition:'João Mendes Ribeiro: Twenty Two Drawings'

by João Mendes Ribeiro

The set of drawings that integrates the exhibition João Mendes Ribeiro: twenty two drawings covers a wide time frame, with the first drawings, dating back from 1983, made in the Portuguese Architecture History classes, in the early years when João Mendes Ribeiro was still an Architecture student in the Porto Fine Arts School. The most recent ones are from 2010 and 2011, referring to works built in Coimbra. The set comprehends two different kinds of drawing: observation drawings of cities and buildings and project sketches. The observation drawings are, naturally, the older ones. The latest, and also the more specific ones, are the project sketches. Despite the specific nature of each one of them, they all incorporate one same way of thinking through drawing. Following a clear and coherent path, the drawing first made with observation as a tool for thinking, slowly gives place to a more concrete and literal one, made with thinking as a tool for building.
Showing this set of drawings in a large room in the Colégio das Artes, the former Coimbra University Hospital building, introduced the scale confrontation from where the exhibition project was thought. The gap between the delicate dimension of the drawings, by one hand, and the big void of the former hospital room, by the other hand, led to the attempt of creating space inside space. An exhibit structure resulted from this exercise, girdling the big scale and bringing it closer to the observer. This clean and light structure suspends the twenty two drawings in a circular space, enclosed by a white curtain, invoking the memory of the former hospital in both functional and visual terms: the curtain, once used to divide the large ward in smaller, more intimate spaces, is visually supplemented by an approach to the aseptic, white and metallic aesthetic universe of medicine.