At this time, his work on expanding Museum of Roman Art in Merida, southwestern Spain. The study was entrusted to the same architect who designed the museum forty years earlier: Rafael Moneo (1937), the only Spanish architect to win the Pritzker Prize in 1996 for this particular work. But why; The Museum of Roman Art in Romana Augusta Emerita, almost on the border with Portugal, is one of the best museums in Europe, a prime example of public architecture during the heyday of postmodernism in the 1980s. In this work, Moneo main elements of architectural art, primarily in its connection with archeology. Concepts such as memory, integration, cultural continuity, transmission, convention, the dialogue between modern and historical heritage, as well as its allegorical transcription, find here a rare embodiment in the panorama of international architecture of recent decades.

“Rome of Spain”

The Museum of Roman Art of the Spanish city synthesizes the main elements of architecture in relation to archeology.

A distant provincial Merida north of Seville, this “Rome of Spain” is a kind of vast archaeological park on which the newest city was founded. It was founded in August 25 BC. as an advanced outpost of the Roman Empire and is an eloquent reflection of its power. Impressive evidence, along with other monuments, remains today of the theater, amphitheater and stadium, which contributed to the inclusion of the archaeological complex of Mérida in the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. This impressive 5,500-seat theater has hosted an ancient drama festival every summer since 1934. Thus, the theater joins a long European tradition of reviving ancient Greek tragedies, which began in 1914 with the legendary theater of Syracuse in Sicily.

In order to house the vast amount and importance of the city’s archaeological material, Moneo plans in the early 1980s to establish a museum at the archaeological site that was already in direct contact with the new urban structure (the same approach would be found two decades later in the Acropolis Museum of Athens). Moneo, a lover of Roman art, writes an architectural essay as a depiction of Romanity, resorting to abstract and allusive iconography. He tries to formulate the idea of ​​historical memory, but with elements from other eras, from Gothic architecture to the latest industrial traditions. He guides mnemonic reductions, never resorting to morphocratic imitation. He constructs and reconstructs reality on our behalf “by analogy”, in an ambiguous game between the realism of the experienced environment and the imaginary form of the past.

Moneo’s Masterpiece is an architectural essay for which he was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1996.

The museum is located nearby and is in dialogue with the Roman theater and amphitheatre. It is characterized neither by isomorphic faces nor by the idea of ​​symmetry. On the façade housing the museum services, on the axis of the road separating it from the archaeological site, no morphological emphasis is placed, as if it were the main view, but instead a “domestic” character is proposed with characteristic Mediterranean shutters. offices. The entrance is made from the side and from the elongated deaf “Gothic” side of the building towards the city, the shape of which is based on the rhythmic sequence of rough buttresses. Services for visitors are clearly separated from the main museum organization: to approach it, one must descend one level on a double ramp, on the path of initiation, expectation and preparation for revelation.

An evocative memorial space with allegorical references

The interior of the museum is actually larger and even more monumental than even the most skillful photographs show (this once again confirms the fact that architecture is only something that we can visit and experience in life). However, the initial feeling of monumentality of the interior is connected not only with the size, but also with the language and expressiveness of the space. This is not about questions of hierarchy, symmetry, or materials, but about the expressive intensity and mystery of the references.

The New National Gallery of Mies in Berlin, the buildings of Le Corbusier in Santiago, the architecture of Louis Kahn are also monumental. The element of monumentality is not excluded from the architecture of our time, when it transforms and gives meaning to the elements of the man-made environment, cultural space or collective memory.

The organization of the interior of the museum is based on a sequence of superimposed walls not of Roman, but of Gothic origin. This succession is “decorated” by a transverse central nave with successive arches inspired by Trajan’s Gate, a monument that is still the symbol of the city of Mérida. To the left of this central aisle, the exhibition spaces are arranged in a row, like the “chapels” of a Catholic basilica, while to the right, the main exhibition space is built on the synthetic and functional principles of modern architecture. In fact, these are not “showrooms”, but transparent spaces with multiple optical exits, where the flow of visitors’ movement is free and unhindered. The lighting is mostly natural, as befits a sculpture museum.

Exhibition objects are freely and conveniently placed in space, on specially designed pedestals and inserts: here the influence of the Italian school, museums such as Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, etc. is recognized. The leading exposition episode is the screen wall in the perspective depth of the arched building: here the placement of sparagami draws inspiration from the configuration of the Medici villa in Rome of the 16th century.

A similar “archaeological library” solution was chosen by David Chipperfield for the excellent Neues Museum, which he restored in Berlin a few years ago. Finally, the name “crypt” is indicative, which was given to the underground space, reminiscent of a catacomb of archaeological finds with free passage for the visitor there.

Conversation with the environment

The extraordinary postmodernism of Rafael Moneo in this museum is truly European. He does not destroy History, like the American equivalent, but includes it and emphasizes it without the slightest historicist intention. As such, he is a “localist” by nature: Moneo captures his work and interacts with his environment with a sensibility we tend to attribute to “critical localism” fanatics. Appropriate sensitivity is manifested in the choice and use of building materials. The exploration of every cultural feature is also another intangible value of its architecture. Moneo’s work, despite the difference in initial experiences, could interact with the work of a younger but suitably genuinely “European” architect such as David Chipperfield in terms of inclusion, memory, materiality and understanding of cultural contexts.

In the Mérida Museum, in this archive of stone ruins, the eternal interplay of old and new, original and standard, evokes constant mental activity. Aqueducts, baths, bridges, underground arcades, arches of Roman or medieval origin are remembered here as allegorical scenography, as they coexist with the anti-point-rationalist concept of the exhibition environment, at different levels not only of space and plot, but also in terms of genre and form of materials (floors , handrails, etc.). However, the most original reduction is due to the superimposed “Roman” walls, which are built from two layers of bricks used as “forms” for the intermediate pouring of concrete.

The walls appear to the visitor without any visible bonding material to give them structural or “archaeological” weight. What we see is a staged hypothetical-abstract reduction to poetic Romanism, freeing mechanistic mimicry from any intention. Art lives in art, in a shell that reconstructs not an era, but its mnemonic idea in our cultural perception.

Mr. Andreas Giakumakatos, Professor Emeritus of ASKT, is Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Florence.