The brief for the Diploma Design Master Thesis 2009 is for a new Art Hostel for Instituto Cultural Inhotim, in Brumadinho, Brazil. The brief calls for innovative and new solutions to the function of lodging and residence combined with challenging demands on the social function and role of the building.
The proposals must be formulated on the basis of the research and experiments that you have conducted during the last year-and-a-half in SAC. In addition, the brief calls for new and additional research being conducted in reference to the type of building and its specific program and context.

BACKGROUND
Each year, Instituto Cultural Inhotim serves a large number of visitors travelling small to large distances to enjoy its excellent art and botanical collections. The visitors range from individuals, via families to groups, and many of the latter comprise students dedicated to an extended visit. Not the least, Inhotim, with its existing educational and research programs, seeks to cater to the these groups for general and specific educational purposes.
In order to meet with this wish and the future potential of expanding its educational and research programs, Inhotim seeks to enlarge its collection of buildings to include one that offers a hostel service. The building must have the capacity to accommodate up to 30 people of both genders and mixed backgrounds, including the service of a kitchen to serve them and a space that can seat up to 100 persons for a meal.
Also, the building must include social spaces and, optionally, small and adequate meeting and work spaces. The social aspect is central to Inhotim’s ambition for the project. Most importantly, the building is to be located in such a manner and include the spatial functions to negotiate between the gated grounds of the museum and the local settlement of Brumadinho. This requirement puts special demands on the design of the building as it can also be understood as a gateway between two constituent groups or localities (Inhotim and Brumadinho) with the visitors to the hostel acting as go-betweens or free-agents that negotiate between the two.
But, first and last, the hostel is an ‘Art Hostel’, whatever that might mean other than that the building is part of the Inhotim real estate. This is where your expertise comes in. Rather than being offered a building room program with fixed room sizes and organization, the proposal asks to explore the typology of a hostel with respect to the specific location, programmatic demands and the own architectural imagination. In this sense, the design proposal is to reflect an exploratory and experimental approach to the task.