{"id":197620,"date":"2022-06-08T12:56:51","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T16:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/?post_type=id_project&p=197620"},"modified":"2022-11-22T09:52:12","modified_gmt":"2022-11-22T14:52:12","slug":"foster-partners-translates-architectural-classicism-into-modernism-at-the-narbo-via-museum-in-france","status":"publish","type":"id_project","link":"https:\/\/interiordesign.net\/projects\/foster-partners-translates-architectural-classicism-into-modernism-at-the-narbo-via-museum-in-france\/","title":{"rendered":"Foster + Partners Translates Architectural Classicism into Modernism at the Narbo Via Museum in France"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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More than 800 Roman funerary stones are displayed in a custom industrial shelving system at the Narbo Via Museum in Narbonne, France, by Foster + Partners.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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June 8, 2022<\/p>\n\n\n

Words: <\/span>Joseph Giovannini<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photography: <\/span>Nigel Young\/Foster + Partners<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Foster + Partners Translates Architectural Classicism into Modernism at the Narbo Via Museum in France<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Some commissions might tempt an architect to dial back time. But for the Narbo Via Museum in Narbonne, France, which displays Roman antiquities, Foster + Partners<\/a> eschewed pediments, columns, capitals, or other elements of literal historicism. Rather the firm worked in a completely contemporary architectural language, combining state-of-the-art concrete construction, prefabricated building components, and simple notions of mass and spatial gravitas to evoke ancient building traditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Present-day Narbonne was once Narbo, the first capital of Roman Gaul, and an important Mediterranean riverine port. In the Middle Ages, the city\u2019s Roman buildings and funerary monuments became quarries for constructing fortified walls. Centuries later, in the 1860\u2019s, when the walls were dismantled for a modern, expanding city, antiquarians retrieved stone blocks carved with figures and texts, and stored them in stacks in a Romanesque church. In 2012, Narbonne held an invited competition to build a regional museum and study center for the reliefs, one that would also serve, more broadly, as an introduction to all of Rome in the south of France. The blocks needed a controlled, protective environment, a more effective method of display, and facilities for conservation and research. The ruins of a Roman villa had also been discovered 20 years before, and they needed special accommodation, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A wall map of the Roman Empire greets museumgoers in the entry atrium at the Narbo Via Museum in Narbonne, France, by Foster + Partners.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With their mastery of concrete and masonry, Romans were inspired engineers and builders. But they were, in their way, proto-modernists, producing construction components in a handcrafted \u201cindustrial\u201d process for what we would now call systems design. Just down the road in N\u00eemes, a 24,000-seat amphitheater offers an early example of a systems building, with stones\u2014modular, fitted, and carved, some in distorted, non-Euclidean geometries\u2014that were all sized and shaped for designated positions in the oval structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That Roman savoir faire established a precedent for the Foster team, which approached the project with comparable respect, skill, and efficiency, but in an industrialized systems design. Founder and executive chairman Norman Foster himself Romanized the agenda: \u201cNorman was very insistent that if we were expressing the design as massive, it should be massive, to refer to the language of Roman architecture, instead of covering a frame with finishes, as we normally do,\u201d partner and project architect Hugh Stewart notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More than 800 Roman funerary stones are displayed in a custom industrial shelving system.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Like a Roman military formation going into battle, the 104,300-square-foot building is square in plan, with walls of dry-packed, pigmented concrete manually tamped in layers\u2014rosy striations that recall the sedimentary rock canyons of Petra, Jordan, carved with Hellenistic funerary temples. Organized in strict rectilinear geometries, the weighty, 32-inch-thick walls convey a monumentality whose traditions reach beyond Rome back to ancient Egypt\u2019s Karnak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A tall, cathedral-like hall divides the building into two rec\u00adtangular sections. The soaring space houses more than 800 funerary stones, which are stacked in a clifflike grid of galvanized-steel racks. This is the public-facing side of an industrial storage system with a factory-style gantry that allows museum staff on the other side to retrieve any artifact needed for study or conservation. Otherwise, the stones remain in full view of museumgoers, who can access information about them on interactive touchscreens. Dubbed the lapidary wall, the enormous structure turns what would normally be a back-of-house area into an exhibition hall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The single-story building comprises structural walls of packed dry-mix concrete sup\u00adporting a cast-concrete roof. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The prefabricated concrete roof extends beyond the load-bearing perimeter walls, providing shade from the meridional sun. Since the museum sits on a plinth, all HVAC ducts and the like run under the floor\u2014another very Roman idea\u2014leaving the underside of the roof as an unadorned ceiling. The interior spaces are modular, \u201cto allow a large degree of flexibility and also an interpenetration of public and professional zones,\u201d Stewart says. \u201cThe modular approach to planning gives you all sorts of visual axes penetrating the plan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The public entry is like the atrium of a Roman house, a lofty courtyard centered on a shallow reflecting pool with a roof opening above. It leads into the larger of the museum\u2019s two constituent sections, which houses galleries for temporary and permanent exhibitions (including appropriately scaled spaces for frescoes and other artifacts from the ruined villa) along with a restaurant, shop, and small auditorium. Meeting rooms, administrative offices, workshops, and research areas occupy the smaller of the two sections, on the other side of the lapidary wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
An open courtyard, one of three in the administrative section, recalls the atrium in a Roman house. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With its dry-packed walls, precast-concrete roof, galvanized-steel storage racks and fittings, and polished concrete flooring, the museum is \u201ca true brutalist building: no finishes on anything,\u201d Stewart acknowledges. \u201cThe project harks back to the early days of Foster Associates as a kind of modular, lightweight structural building but with a single big difference: much heavier construction.\u201d For a museum about classical architecture, the firm has a produced a classic of modernism that in its clarity, purity, and spare monumentality achieves, without historical pastiche, the authenticity of a Roman build\u00ading. The two traditions coincide in a regular, repetitive, engineered structure\u2014the language of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n