The complex of the Contemporary Arts Center of Ribeira Grande is composed of the old building of a former plant for the production of alcohol and tobacco (two traditional sources of wealth of the Azores Islands) and a series of new pavilions that complete it to house a complex program consisting of a cultural center, a multipurpose space devoted to the performance arts, laboratories, studios, and large storage areas.

The key to the project lies in the dialogue between old and new; a dialogue as far from literal imitation of the preexisting as from exaggeration of the differences between the factory and the recently built parts. Faced with the volumetric and historical diversity of the buildings, the design gives priority to unifying the complex. To achieve this, the architects have opted for a very tenuous analogous imitation resting on the interpretation of types, the abstraction of forms, and the continuity of materials. In this way, the old and new pavilions are arranged around small courts, of human scale, where various accessways converge; all the volumes adopt the pitched roof and ornament-free surfaces that characterized the factory; and the materials used have as much to do with the preexisting construction as with the culture of the Azores Islands: facades of immaculate white plaster and of local black basalt masonry.