The salt pans of Aveiro have been worked for a thousand years. They produce one of the most particular landscapes in Portugal: perfectly flat, perfectly white, and governed by water, wind and evaporation. The new gallery sits at the boundary between the pans and the town, on the site of a former salt warehouse.

The competition brief asked for flexible exhibition space. We proposed the opposite: nine rooms that are specific, each designed around a single condition of daylight. Curators choose rooms for works, rather than adapting rooms to them.

The rooms are connected by a long gallery that runs parallel to the water. Its floor is a single 140-metre band of white terrazzo, ground from local aggregate and salt-resistant cement; at its end it steps down into a shallow reflecting pool, level with the pans.

The structure is cast in-situ with a pale aggregate and left unfinished. The building is designed to weather. Salt will leave its mark on the lower walls, as it has on every building in this landscape.