HISTORY MUSEUM OF LUGO
DESIGN BY NIETO SOBEJANO ARCHITECTS
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HISTORY MUSEUM OF LUGO
DESIGN BY NIETO SOBEJANO ARCHITECTS
The building site, which until not long ago housed industrial
structures- is located in a position relatively displaced from the historic
centre of Lugo. However, it will soon become a point of arrival for visitors to
the city.
It may well seem awkward to assimilate architecture into landscape,
but this is one of the cases in which we would like to think that the
relationship between the two is more than a set phrase. We propose a
museum-park or a park-museum, which will be linked to the sequence of green
areas in the city, hiding the parking areas underground and emerging in a
constellation of cylindrical lanterns scattered throughout a continuous green
field.
As it happens every time an architectural idea is intended to be
built –which very frequently emerges from intuition-, it is the analysis of the
program and its location that causes the specific proposal to make sense. We
will divide the program into two large, connected areas: the parking and the
visitor centre. The strong difference in height between the East and West ends
of the building site suggests the possibility of taking +444m as an average
reference level, in such a way that the garage is developed nearly at street
level, thus remaining half-buried.
The Visitor Centre is essentially organised on a single floor
illuminated through large circular courtyards, which allow natural light to
penetrate and permit independent, controlled use. From the main courtyard, the most
peculiar and tallest exhibition rooms will emerge -as contemporary cylindrical
bastions-, which will become the image of the new building which is projected
towards the exterior.
The exhibiting area has been conceived from two types of spaces:
one which is neutral, flexible, suitable for the exhibition of panels, and will
contain interactive modules or glass cabinets with original pieces; the other
is defined by three cylindrical bastions, which are peculiar spaces due to
their shape and dimension, suitable for audiovisual installations and
projections. Both the Museum and the Visitor Centre are articulated in a
sequence of interior and exterior spaces with multiple itineraries in which the
landscape and History will be able to convey the intimate link that unites them.
Awareness towards environmental issues is a consequence of the
project’s conception itself. The strong impact that a large amount of vehicles
-cars and buses- would have produced on the surface is avoided by hiding the
parking area under the undulating cover of vegetation. Likewise, the spaces
destined for visitors and the museum occupy a half-buried floor under the same
green foliage, which favours thermal inertia, thus reducing the need for energy
contribution. The exhibition towers emerging from the garden will be externally
re-covered by a light, metallic skin, which will accommodate the incorporation
of solar panels and night-time lighting in its design, by way of a contemporary
interpretation of the Roman wall’s bastions.
The new Museum will entail the experience of a walk through a
vegetative, metallic landscape, a luminous field whose night-time glow will
seem to emerge from within the earth. The Lugo Museum
will evoke images of fields and caves, walls and fortified towers
–metaphors of a landscape and a culture that the inhabitants of Lugo carry
within their own memory.
Photography is by Fernando Alda.
You may see more images of this project on Fernando Alda's website.
NIETO SOBEJANO
Enrique Sobejano (Madrid, Spain, 1957) has worked as an architect since
graduating from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Graduate School
of Architecture and Planning at Columbia University in New York in 1981. He is
professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK), where he holds the chair
of Principles of Design. He has been a visiting critic and lecturer at various
international universities worldwide. From 1986 to 1991 he was co-director of
the architectural journal ARQUITECTURA, published by the Colegio Oficial de
Arquitectos de Madrid. He chairs and participates in international conferences
and juries and is a founding partner of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos.
Fuensanta
Nieto (Madrid, Spain, 1957) has worked as an
architect since graduating from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the
Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at Columbia University in New York
in 1981. She is a founding partner of Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos and a
professor at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. Fuensanta Nieto lectures on
architecture and participates in juries and symposia at various institutions
around the world. From 1986 to 1991 she was co-director of the architectural
journal ARQUITECTURA, published by the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid.
Nieto
Sobejano Arquitectos was founded
in 1985 by Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano and has offices in Madrid and,
since 2007, in Berlin. Along with being widely published in international
magazines and books, the firm’s work has been exhibited at the Biennale di
Venezia in 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2012; at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New
York, in 2006, at the Kunsthaus in Graz in 2008 and at the MAST Foundation in
Bologna, Italy in 2014. They are the recipients of the 2008 National Prize for
Restoration from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the 2010 Nike Prize issued
by the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA), as well as the Aga Khan Award for
Architecture (2010), the Piranesi Prix de Rome (2011), the European Museum of
the Year Award (2012), the Hannes Meyer Prize (2012), Honorary Fellow of AIA
(2015) and the Alvar Aalto Medal in 2015. Their major works include the Madinat
al-Zahra Museum, the Moritzburg Museum, the San Telmo Museum, the Joanneum
extension in Graz, and the Contemporary Art Centre in Córdoba. Nieto Sobejano
Arquitectos currently have projects in Germany, Spain, Austria, Estonia and
Morocco. Two monographs have been recently published about their work:
"Nieto Sobejano. Memory and Invention" (Hatje Cantz Verlag,
Ostfildern, Germany, 2013) and "Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano.
Architetture" (Mondadori Electa Spa, Milano, Italy, 2014).
http://www.nietosobejano.com/info.aspx
