MNMC - Museu Nacional Machado de Castro | Gonçalo Byrne Arquitectos

Two thousand years ago, up in the central hill of Coimbra, a rectangular platform supported by two vaulted layers – a Roman Criptoporticum – was built to contain the Central forum of the Roman City of “Aeminiun”. This Forum disappeared in time but the Criptoporticum remained almost intact in its powerful tectonics, acting like a sort of table where time sequential fragments add, mix, sometimes subtract, cut off architectonic pieces of the long history of Western European Architecture. These fragments of Roman, Islamic, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Romantic Revival Modernity also reflect different uses along time, from the central mixed use of the Roman Forum, to stocking warehouse, street shops, attached housing, horse stables, etc. In Christianity it becomes the Episcopal Residence from twelfth century up to the early twentieth. In 1910 the all block it’s finally converted into a city Museum, displaying mainly a remarkable XVI century renaissance collection. In the sixties a precious “Jean de Rouen” renaissance chapel is dismantled from its original site and reassembled as an “Out of Scale” museum object, allowing a more substantial intervention to create an appropriate and protected exhibition atmosphere. To recreate a new Museum out of such time and shape complexity is a very demanding but fascinating task. A promenade through the fragmentary time printed condition of the inherited architecture is an essential experience to live, both from the internal point of view, and also from the differentiate openings to the surroundings – from total introspection of Criptoporticum to wide open perception of the long term city layers, cascading down to the river valley. Two adjacent empty plots, were available first for the Administration offices and the closer one to Technical Services, infrastructure and vertical accessibility so that one can reach every level of the new Museum without intruding on the historic compact fabric. This new volume underlines the original platform level of the ex-Forum extending a panoramic terrace which creates an intense dual visual relationship either with the hoping historic city and the close presence of the Fillipo Terzi renaissance portico and its powerful framing of the courtyard. Main entrance keeps the original gate to the ex-bishop’s palace and its central courtyard as an essential void where the potential of the ex-Forum can be recreated, a space where you can anticipate the all sensitive experience of the visit, starting with the hidden underground void structure either coming to its edge through the Terzi portico or entering the side spaces of different circuits, or simply bridging into the Museum restaurant and its Terrace. This main volume is very precisely limited to the original perimeter of the Forum and the external façade of the Criptoporticum is strongly enhanced in its urban intermediation, separated from the adjacent new building by a public staircase that makes real the experience of its germinal presence in the new Museum as well as the foundational center point of the city of Coimbra. The contemporary experience of the visit reveals the all artifact as a sort of condenser of the surrounding city where more similarities, analogies, contrasting perspectives can be realized either in fragmentary or more unitarian perception.