This local maritime museum elegantly fuses the particular with the universal.

ARX Portugal is a collective of architects established in Lisbon in 1991 by brothers José and Nuno Mateus, both graduates on the city’s Technical University. Through the experience of studying and working abroad (in Columbia and Houston, and with Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind), they bring a formal and textual boldness to their work, yet this is tempered by a subtle sensuality and an inherent awareness of Portuguese place and character. In common with many younger practices, they began with small things – houses and interiors – but have since  graduated to more substantial commissions, while both periodically teaching, writing and broadcasting. Their largest and best known project to date is the Maritime Museum in Íhavo, an imaginative remodelling of a local museum that demonstrates a maturity and assurance that surely destines them for wider recognition.

Ílhavo on the central Portuguese coast has a long history of boats and seafaring. For centuries it has been home to ocean-going cod fishing fleets and flat-bottomed skiffs that skim lightly around the salt pans at the mouth of the Aveiro river in search of shellfish and seaweed. The town’s original maritime museum was built in the 1970s and was typical of its era in its arrangement of functional, factory-like volumes. When ARX were commissioned to provide the municipality with something better, the obvious impulse was to demolish the 70s relic and begin again, but EC funding was contingent on the project being a refurbishment rather than new build, so necessitating a more pragmatic response.

This pragmatism, however, is shot through with poetry. The old post and beam structure of the original building delineates the footprint of a greatly expanded complex (almost doubled in size) crowned by an irregularly serrated roofscape that pokes up from behind the suburban houses like fish fins or petrified sails. More explicitly, the building is an event on the horizon, like a ship at sea, with its assemblage of long white volumes rising out of a dense dark base clad in strips of charcoal-coloured slate. The black slate recalls the black of the industrious skiffs rather than the more florid hues of the fishing fleets, establishing a minimal, duotone palette of white plaster, black slate and grey zinc that enfolds the angular undulations of the new roof.

Set back from the street on the north-east side (preserving the original alignment), the building defines a new public precinct that owes something to Eisenman´s fashionable fracturing and pudgering of topography, but here is more gently executed, with simple timber benches and gravel laid in angled beds edged with strips of rusted steel. The black slate wall demarcates the boundary of the site and encloses an internal patio garden on the south-west side, landscaped in a similar Eisenmanesque fashion. At the heart of the patio is a reflecting pool around which the new parts are disposed, so that, appropriately, the presence of waters is never very far away, casting shimmering reflection throughout the interior.

New volumes either emerge from or are anchored onto the original structure – the double-height Sala da Ria with its impressive collection of boats; a new administrative block with a library and café; and a central tower for temporary exhibitions. This last is a tall cuboid volume wrapped in slate which actually sits in the pool, its dark, enigmatic mass giving the disarming impression of floating on water. On the secondary street facade, to the north-west, the slate base is punctuated by a series of loading bays, treated as architectural events with ribbed metal doors and stone ramps.

From the entrance foyer another ramp, this time a long dog leg, leads to the upper level of the main exhibitions space, fluidly linking the two floors in a promenade architecturale that offers views out over the reflecting pool and the internal patio. Light is captured and reflected into the lofty upper floor through the crunched collision of serrated skylights, bathing the exhibition spaces in a delicate luminescence. A common architectural language of white walls and black slate floors unifies the interior, with honorific touches such as the slim steel balustrading and the delicately veined white marble used for the ramp and staircases.

Individual spaces are neutral backdrops for the display of objects, which range from maritime maps, models and tools to much larger boats and sails, including the Faina Maior cod fishing vessel which occupies the ground floor of the main exhibition hall. Abstract silhouettes of seafarers and dockers inhabit the collection, giving a sense of scale and human animation to the tableaux, but without the usual waxwork cheesiness. The architects designed these, along with the elegant steel and glass display cases and the customized lettering on the exterior. Together they manifest a thoughtful but not overpowering attention to detail that transforms and elevates the building into a richly nuanced contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk.

Íhavo has always had a great affection for its museum, despite it being a relatively modest local institution. Its dissemination of maritime life continues to play an important part in the area’s sense of identity and ARX’s intelligent remodelling celebrates and consolidates the particular, while also touching on more immutable, elemental themes of light and dark, earth and water, sea and sky.