Up-to-date Yongyan Jin

1. Joseph Mankiewicz, All about Eve, 1950

2. Jose maria Sanchez garcia, Temple of Diana, 2011

In Joseph Mankiewicz’s film ‘’All about Eve’’, Karen says to Eve at Margo’s party: “Next to that sable, my new mink seems like an old bed jacket.” Will the building lose its need to survive in today’s society because of its old structure, obsolete materials, and outdated decorations? whether the birth of new buildings will eclipse old buildings and lose their value?

In the project surrounding the Temple of Diana, architectural practice Jose Maria Sanchez Garcia have attempted to recover the urban space from Roman times. They introduce a contemporary building at the perimeter of the urban volume that is described in an alternating pattern of voids and rooms held by a single elevated platform that liberates the archaeological at ground level. Between the perimeter and the city, a volume in the form of hanging boxes occupy interstitial spaces accommodating commercial and cultural uses. Thus, the project, rather than a building is a raised platform, a floating structure capable of generating a new layer of city full of program. The platform stands at about the same height of the podium of the temple to allow visitors to watch it as they were inside, while projecting a shadow over the square. This way the temple environment gets ‘hierarchy’, making the understanding of the space clear and not interrupted by the particularities of the of the back part of the existing buildings.

In the contemporary urban environment, the absence space like Temple of Diana is given value, the modern architectural strategy promotes the historical fragments heritage more.