Casa da Cultura Mario Quintana, Cultural center and historic hotel in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Casa da Cultura Mario Quintana is a seven-story building in downtown Porto Alegre housing theater spaces, galleries, cinema, and libraries. The eclectic architecture organizes multiple artistic venues across its floors.
Construction began in 1916 and the first part opened in 1918; the east wing was designed in 1926 and the hotel was completed in 1933 with seven floors in the east wing and five in the west. The reinforced-concrete building, designed by Theodor Wiederspahn for Horácio de Carvalho, was restored between 1987 and 1990 and inaugurated as a cultural center on 25 September 1990.
The building is named after Mário Quintana, the Alegrete-born poet who adopted Porto Alegre and lived in apartment 217 from 1968 to 1980. The Mário Quintana Collection and the Elis Regina Collection are kept here, and the José Lutzenberger Garden on the fifth-floor terrace, created in 2002, reuses the old hotel's pots and bathtubs to grow marsh, desert, prairie and tropical plants.
The building spans both sides of Travessa Araújo Ribeiro, with the two blocks joined by walkways over the street; enter from the Largo da Alfândega side. The José Lutzenberger garden sits on the fifth-floor terrace. Allow time for the libraries, galleries, theaters and three cinemas.
Mário Quintana lived in apartment 217 from 1968 to 1980, when the Majestic had shrunk from three hundred rooms to about a hundred and housed permanent residents. The Elis Regina and Mário Quintana Collections are among the cultural spaces now in the building.
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