Chilean Police Museum and Cultural Centre

Police Museum and Cultural Centre

The Project for the new museum and the historic museum renovation was an order for the General Director Alejandro Bernales (R.I.P)
The idea of Carabineros de Chile consists in the challenge to get the expansion of the old museum and the new museum highlights the historical value.
A first consideration is to hollow and redesign the interior of the historic building preserving the façades and getting a new spatial interior. Paintings white all the façades and interiors and getting the connectivity between the new and the renovation and the intervention.
A second action is the architectonic idea to cave and put the buildings in several levels underground. Then we obtain the double purpose to not touch the park and the trees of the site and to highlight the historic building that now reflects the façades in two big water mirrors to Antonio Varas Avenue.
Then it a building that gets the most spaces underground but getting natural light for interiors patios and cracks that permits a path also for the exterior.
Materiality:
All the façades of the new volumes are resolved with Concrete incorporating titanium dioxide and a system of phenolic molds with 5 inch wide planks.
The white walls highlighted in the abstract between the intense green of the trees and the green roofs of the buildings.
The program
The program also provides the showrooms of museums, the cultural centers administrative offices; an underground parking building and a theater with capacity for 740 people with boxes allowing the orchestra and the choir of the police play along.
The theater is resolved entire in Cedar wood and the waving roofing permits an acoustic experience and an excellence vision. In the same level is the cafeteria and restaurant with an expansion to exterior terraces that permits good ventilation and natural lighting.

Architect: Gonzalo Mardones Viviani
Engineer: Cristián Delporte
Builders: Pitagoras
Lighting: Paulina Sir
Location: Antonio Varas Avenue, Providencia, Santiago de Chile
Historic Museum: 1.033,06 m2
New Museum (inc. Theater): 3.620,80 m2
Theater: 969,97 m2
Theater capacity: 724 seats
Parking: 2.064,70 m2 (underground)
Parking: 187 parking underground + 116 parking over ground
Construction Year: 2010
Photographer: Pedro Mutis Johnson

Chilean Police Museum and Cultural Centre by Gonzalo Mardones in Chile won the WA Award Cycle 10. Please find below the WA Award poster for this project.