It should be taken into account that the museum rooms and objects form only the container, the content of which is formed by the visitors. It is this content that distinguishes a museum from a private collection”

Georges Bataille

The museum presents itself as a three dimensional gateway to the excavation site and the network of paths, encouraging visitors to take advantage of the building as an elevator and bridge that helps to span the height difference between the access to the site and the excavation pits with no effort. In cities such as Lisbon in Portugal or Bahia in Brazil, urban elevators connect lower and higher areas of cities, working as a vertical connection between two discontinuous grids or networks of streets and alleys. In the same way, the project seeks to serve as an artificial shortcut in the movement through the site, providing, not a shorter path in distance, but a shortcut in physical effort for all visitors to the site.

This major architectural gesture is a tactical procedure serving different two simultaneous strategies:

1- Conducting the flow of visitors to the site through the museum building, forcing a contact between all visitors and the findings of the excavations. This connection between the indoor exhibits and the paths on the hill, turns outdoor visitors into museum explorers and the actual excavation pits into part of the museum experience. The building’s elevators are incorporated into the networks of paths across the site, an so are the restaurant, shop and services as well as the most important, the exhibits themselves.

2- Generating a building for the museum whose character varies gradually from a bridge-like building to an underground construction. Visitors will experience a subtle change as they move through the project, first coming out of the elevators in a building that is suspended over the ground and looking out to the near river and the surrounding fields; as they move horizontally through the building, because of museum’s relation to the slope, they will gradually find themselves in an underground condition, in an exhibition hall with no views to the exterior and with light coming in only through patios. This is were the findings from the excavations will be on display,

The circulation concept is a continuous loop that starting at the lobby connects through a ramp the lobby level with the site-remains hall one floor below, followed by the rest of the exhibits on the lower floor, at the end of which a set of stairs next to a patio will conduct visitors back again to the upper floor, to view the rest of the exhibits before returning to the lobby. Of course this continuous loop can be followed in any direction, according to the visitors wish, viewing first the actual findings and then the exhibits that help explain their importance and the process of their discovery, or the other way round, viewing the findings after the contact with the explanatory exhibits.

From the lobby one can also exit the building through the roof of the administration and educational areas and walk through the exterior paths to view the actual excavation pits. This can also be done before of after entering the exhibition hall, generating this way a multiplicity of possible experiences when visiting the site rather than a linear succession of halls and exhibits.

Progettazione

•Dieguez Fridman Arquitectos & Asociados, Progettista

Collaborazioni

•Odile L'Hardy Diego Ferreiro Mauro Accattoli Maria Carranza Ana Sol Smud Jazmin Zang , Gruppo di progettazione