INTRODUCTION With Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture the city of Guimarães has grown upon itself, experienced new ways of doing things and of facing up to problems and their implications on ways of doing things. Together with its traditional and iconic representations it has also experienced the value of being a living city in transformation. Guimarães 2012 European Capital of Culture aimed to: meet the needs of the city-its history and heritage, its resources, and the particular way of understanding life and its representations; discuss and adapt new tools of making culture; meet new cultural and economical challenges; have an educational dimension, not only regarding mediation between creation and the younger members of the public, but regarding training in context, and the experience of taking part in creative processes; be European, holding up local as well as global values that consider unity in diversity and the awareness that it is the roots of the past that uphold the present. Four programming clusters were defined: City, Community, Thought and Art – the latter one unfolds in four artistic disciplines: Music, Performing Arts, Art and Architecture and, finally, Film and Audiovisual. The Art and Architecture programme was divided into four cycles: On audiences, Means of production, Scales and territories and the (off)cycle entitled New languages and public space. In a broad sense, the structure of the programme revolves around concepts of spatialisation and dissemination. The aim is to generate different types of physical and symbolic space in which ABSTRACT: Timber is one of the most used materials in the ephemeral architecture. Ephemeral buildings appeared in the course of architectural history as provisional phenomena, standing only for a short time. It was a genre seen by architects, designers and sculptures themselves as an experiment, finding new possibilities, techniques and styles. ConstructLab is a collaborative construction practice working with ephemeral projects. Unlike the conventional architectural process in which the architect designs and the builder builds, in ConstructLab called projects conception and construction are brought together. The designer builds and continues to design on site. The present work aims to present and discuss the results of the structural analysis of the Curators' Lab Arena, which included the characterization of the mechanical and physical behaviour by means of the assessment of ultimate strength capacity and global deformation. This way, perfect knowledge of structural properties becomes essential, for it is needed to comprehend and understand when more complex numeric analysis tools are used. At the same time this is an exceptional opportunity of sharing some knowledge and experience between investigators of the wooden structures field, architects and designers sharing experiences and knowledge with this integrated investigation.