Holescape

Space for Contemporary Art and Culture – Park Zone 3
Burgas, Bulgaria

Holescape reimagines “The Hole”—a long-abandoned excavation left behind by an unfinished redevelopment project—not as an urban scar to be erased, but as the foundation for a new civic landscape. Instead of filling the void, the proposal accepts its existing topography as the site's strongest identity and transforms it into the primary spatial framework for contemporary culture.

The project challenges the conventional notion of a cultural building as an isolated object. Rather than occupying the center of the site, the architecture is carefully positioned along its eastern edge, preserving the openness of the excavation while establishing a clear urban frontage toward the city. This strategy allows the void itself to remain the project's central public space, where landscape, architecture, and civic life are experienced as a continuous whole.

A publicly accessible green roof extends the surrounding ground plane over the building, creating a new pedestrian route that reconnects Troykata Square, Baba Ganka Square, and the neighboring urban fabric. Visitors gradually descend through the landscape into a sequence of galleries, performance spaces, educational facilities, workshops, and public gathering areas embedded within the terrain. The building becomes less an object placed on the site than an extension of the landscape itself.

The proposal also embraces environmental performance through its relationship with the existing landform. By embedding much of the program below grade, the design benefits from the earth's thermal mass to improve energy efficiency while minimizing the visual impact of the building within its historic surroundings. The extensive green roof enhances biodiversity, mitigates urban heat gain, manages stormwater, and creates an accessible public park above the cultural facilities.

Rather than replacing the site's difficult history, Holescape preserves it as collective memory. The excavation is reinterpreted as a place of encounter, culture, and everyday public life, where the landscape becomes the architecture and the architecture becomes part of the city. The project transforms an abandoned urban void into a resilient cultural infrastructure that reconnects people, place, and memory while offering Burgas a new civic destination rooted in its own unique topography.

The proposal was awarded Rank No. 9 among 145 international competition entries for the 2025 International Architectural Competition for the Space for Contemporary Art and Culture – Park Zone 3 in Burgas, Bulgaria.