Riverside Cultural Center

The site had been closed to the public for four decades. What remained was a concrete warehouse frame, a rail spur, and roughly two hundred metres of unusable riverbank. The brief asked for a cultural centre; the more urgent question was how to give the river back to the city.

Rather than demolish, the project treats the existing frame as found infrastructure. A timber structure is inserted within it, independent and reversible, carrying the exhibition halls and the library. The gap between old concrete and new timber becomes circulation — a covered street running the full length of the building, open at both ends, usable without a ticket.

The public terrace sits on the roof of the original warehouse, reached by an external stair that continues the line of the embankment. It is the only element that touches the water. Everything else steps back, leaving the bank as an open, planted edge that floods twice a year by design.