PROJECTO DE REMODELAÇÃO E AMPLIAÇÃO DO MUSEU NACIONAL DE MACHADO DE CASTRO / Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos

Curated by ArchDaily

Architects: Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos
Area: 13130 m²
Year: 2013
Photographs:Duccio Malagamba
Structure: Betar, Estudos e Projectos de Estabilidade Lda, Miguel Villar, José Mendonça
Construction Supervision: DGEMN - Direcção Geral dos Edifícios e Monumentos Nacionais, DREMC - Direcção Regional dos Edifícios e Monumentos do Centro, Jorge Rebocho, Luís Ribeiro, António Roseiro, Gabriel Silva
Construction Company: EDIFER, João Alcântara, António Pinto Mendes, Paulo Gomes, Isabel Faulhaber
HVAC: José Galvão Teles Engenheiros Lda, José Galvão Teles

Text description provided by the architects. The museum, located at Alta of Coimbra, is a place of intense sedimentation and historical superimposition over two millennia where lies the Roman Forum Aemininum, the Romanesque church of S. João de Almedina, the gallery of Terzi.

The lucid acceptance of contemporary criticism of these sequences, whence the constant mingling of "container" and "content", is the primary feature of the project in order to correct the rupture of scale and historical context caused by random juxtapositions: two elemental volumes define a flooded neutral space, illuminated by diffuse light to show the temporal sequence of the fragments of the 18th century apse of the Tesoureiro Chapel.

The gallery occupies the entire volume of the trapezoidal shape, rising to four levels and creating a platform (the terrace of the restaurant) where it lays the rectangular volume of transparent and translucent glass that at night becomes a sort of lantern light. The lower volume adapts to the existing layout of the streets, the stone cladding is not mimetic, but consistent with the solid matter of the surrounding buildings; implantation repeats the settlement solution, morphological and hierarchical originally tied to the cryptoporticus of the Roman Forum which in its turn is tied to the museum.

The experience of space is revealed as a sort of condenser of the surrounding city, explained around the visit by similarities, analogies or contrasting perspectives of the city itself and its centuries-old history in a unified perception of beauty.