How Does the Materiality of the Merida Art Museum Help the Architectã¢ââ¢s Intent?
AD Classics: National Museum of Roman Art / Rafael Moneo
This commodity was originally published on May 4, 2015. To read the stories backside other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics department.
Arches have long been used to mark the greatest achievements of Roman civilization. Constantine, Titus, and Septimus Severus built them to commemorate their military machine victories. Engineers at Segovia and Nîmes incorporated them into their revolutionary aqueducts. And fifteen hundred years afterward the Fall of Rome, Rafael Moneo gave a modern touch to the ancient structure in Mérida'south breathtaking National Museum of Roman Fine art, located on the site of the old Iberian outpost of Emerita Augusta. Soaring arcades of elementary, semi-circular arches merge historicity and contemporary design, creating a striking however sensitive indicate of entry to the remains of 1 of the Roman Empire's greatest cities.
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Moneo's committee for the museum came in 1979 as part of the Castilian government'southward celebration of the bimillennial anniversary of the founding of Emerita Augusta. Replacing an 1838 museum on the same site, it was built in the heart of ane of the largest and best preserved Roman cities in Western Europe, immediately adjacent to an amphitheater and one of the well-nigh spectacular surviving ancient theaters in the world – the Roman Theater of Mérida.
Moneo, a native Spaniard who at the time was enjoying a wave of publicity following the completion of the Logroño Urban center Hall and the Bankinter building in Madrid, was an obvious choice for the project, which opened to bully fanfare in 1986.
Occupying the lot across the street from the theater, the bulk of the museum is contained inside a lofty, above-ground building where space is articulated by a series of soaring brick arches. This part of the building is a modernistic accept on the basilica type, with upper-story exhibition spaces replacing clerestory balconies along an open up, amplified key "nave." Natural light pours in from skylights higher up the thin arches and fills the space with a warm glow. Below the ground level, a subterranean "catacomb" immerses visitors into a pristine Roman-era excavation of the old city, allowing the museum to simultaneously conserve and exhibit the archæology of the site while interpretively replicating its compages.
Thin, elongated brickwork, distinctly non-Roman in its shape and perfect uniformity, gives the museum its trademark appearance. Walls, columns, and arches are fabricated of the same fabric, but the appearance is far from monotonous; patchworks of gilded and red hues pigment the walls in pixelated clusters of color, lit afire by the dramatic overhead lighting. For Moneo, whose trunk of work displays remarkable stylistic variation, it is perhaps this conscientious and deliberate control of daylight that makes this edifice characteristically his. Every bit Robert Campbell wrote in a Pritzker retrospective of the architect, "the handling of the interior daylight is masterful, here an ever-changing golden wash. The light contrasts with the ghostly paleness, therefore the pastness, of the antiquities on display." [1]
In this spectacular texture of vertical elements, Moneo articulates a stiff polemic on historicity and modernity past freely borrowing ancient motifs and contemporizing them in a way that is neither blindly imitative nor satirically reductive. The triple-banded arches are allusions to the brickwork of the Roman theater across the street, engaging the entirety of the archeological site in a continuous dialogue while asserting a character all their own. The bricks are precise, rhythmic, and beautifully scaled to evoke a sense of refinement only conceivable in a modern project, particularly when partnered with the sleek iron railings and floating concrete slabs of the upper floors. Yet, there is something fundamentally timeless virtually the simplicity of the structures and their clear invocation of Roman precedent. Form and material belong neither to the present nor to history, allowing the design to straddle the gap between the 2 in a manner uniquely befitting of a modern-day archeological museum.
The interplay of the modern and the ancient exists at fifty-fifty the most conceptual level of the museum's compages, which carefully balances curated museum exhibits with concrete immersion into untouched archeology. In the museum "crypt," the excavation of the ancient urban center is rhythmically punctuated past the ordered column grid supporting the construction in a higher place, a bold still sensitive superimposition of 2 disparate historical conditions. Nearby, a consummate Roman route runs its jagged course through the middle of the museum, breaking from the regimented orthogonality of Moneo'southward design every bit if to assert its unscripted actuality and unmovable presence in the face of modern culture. A subterranean tunnel further engages visitors with the greatest landmarks of Emerita Augusta, ushering them directly into the Roman theater and amphitheater beyond the street. These are elements of a blueprint driven entirely by the unique conditions of its site, demonstrating a delivery to deliberate purposefulness that prioritizes programme and thematic integrity over unnecessary architectural dissonance.
The cavernous above-basis exhibition spaces entreatment to history in another way still, appropriating the enduring power of architectural ruin. The iconic prototype of dereliction—a field of freestanding columns that accept long outlived the roof they once supported—is hauntingly evoked in the main galleries. Massive structural arches that seem capable of supporting a weighty roof are capped instead by a light, burnished covering, creating an interior condition that feels entirely exposed to the exterior world, as if time has slowly worn through the protective covering of architecture. As a result, the infinite is burdened past none of the oppressive weightiness of a traditional roof and the immersive experience within the archeological site feels all the more than authentic.
In an era in which museum commissions as well often represent opportunities for architects to pursue personal agendas with little sensitivity to the objects they are intended to display, Moneo's museum in Mérida is refreshingly cocky-aware of its purpose every bit an exhibition space for the city'southward ancient past. The architecture, independently spectacular though it is, serves not to shamelessly promote itself, but to dramatize the achievements of Roman culture without overshadowing them. It is a masterful negotiation of the ancient and the modern, the inventive and the referential, and a successful rethinking of the museum typology through thoughtful contextualization.
- Yr : 1986
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Photographs : Flickr user James Gordon, Flickr user Manuel Ramirez Sanchez, Flickr user Tomas Fano, Flickr user : Guzman Lozano, Flickr user Daniel Sancho, Flickr user Magnus von Koeller, Flickr user Alvaro Perez Vilarino, Flickr user Fernando Carrasco, Flickr user Rafael del Pine, Flickr user Sarmale / Olga, Flickr user Rafa Perez, Wikipedia user Xauxa
[one] Campbell, Robert. "Thoughts on José Rafael Moneo." The Pritzker Architecture Prize Website. Accessed 28 Oct. 2014 from http://www.pritzkerprize.com/1996/essay.
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Cite: David Langdon. "AD Classics: National Museum of Roman Art / Rafael Moneo" 01 Oct 2018. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/625552/advertizing-classics-national-museum-of-roman-art-rafael-moneo> ISSN 0719-8884
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AD经典: 国家古罗马艺术博物馆 / Rafael Moneo
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Source: https://www.archdaily.com/625552/ad-classics-national-museum-of-roman-art-rafael-moneo
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