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Completed in April 2025, BUREAU’s semi-permanent installation at MAC/CCB reshapes Garagem Sul into a public interior for the museum’s Interspecies program.
Garage Encounters is a project by BUREAU for Garagem Sul at MAC/CCB, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Centre in Lisbon, Portugal. The space is 2,200 m², and the commission is described as semi-permanent scenography, exhibition, and furniture design, completed in April 2025 as the setting for the museum’s Interspecies public program. Ultimately, this isn’t a one-off exhibition layout, but an ongoing spatial kit that reimagines how the institution’s big hall works day to day.
BUREAU’s Daniel Zamarbide is unusually direct about why this territory matters. He describes exhibitions as public spaces—the operational rendez-vous where content is shared and where people of all walks of life hang out, come and go. He places Garage Encounters in a lineage that includes Carlo Scarpa’s politically-charged exhibitions. Lilly Reich’s work, erased from architectural history, was also a source of inspiration. Going further, the project’s concept gets playful as “friends of space” arrive: the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art from Porto, Sir John Soane’s Museum from London, Madrid’s El Prado, the iconic Uffizi from Florence, all fragments displaced but re-enacted to give more accessibility to architecture and art.
The architecture team reused 80% of the existing room’s materials. Apart from using exhibition materials from the past, the architects also reclaimed elements from the space’s own history. Before any of it could land, however, the hall itself had to be tidied up. Accumulated layers needed to go while natural light needed to be set free. Garage Encounters is a multi-layered project that treats the exhibition arena as real spatial work—a changing system that can reopen a room and change how people gather inside it and understand the concept behind the design. Photography by Dylan Perrenoud.
