ARKXSITE - SITE MUSEUM | honorable mention
Up on the northern hill, few ruins remain: vertical ghosts, witness of a rich and diversified past.
Montemor o novo is an historical town located between Evora and Lisbon. Due to this precise location, the town used to play a determinant role in this area. Up on the northern hill, few ruins remain: witness of a rich and diversified past.
Those vertical ghosts play an iconic role on the site. Therefore, Verticality is an important aspect when thinking about the design of a the project. The notion of historical stratification is also linked to the subject we are dealing with.
Considering those two first intuitions, we decided to combine both vertical and longitudinal dynamics into a thin volume, oriented toward Lisbon and Evora. This path is also a recreated link between the western wall and the center of the first settlement.
We tried to express a duality between two entities:
The excavated volume stands for the time-less dimension of the site, whereas the wired 3D grid offers a porous thickness.
From the sides, the building aims (depending on certain conditions) to disappear, to reflect its environment, or to underline the context.
Even though this way to design space could appear as a constraint, it also creates a functional system linking the entities vertically, allowing the visitor to walk freely through the expositions, while being constantly projected in the outside space.
