CASE STUDIES National Museum of Roman Art, Rafael Moneo, 1986 Igualada Cemetery, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos, ~1984
2 copy the physicality of memory
The powerfully emotive image of the Saynatsalo Town Hall is a condensed image of a hill town, reminiscent of familiar childlike images in Medieval paintings... the image of a town projects a greater wealth of narratives and emotions than that of a single building. JUHANI PALLASMAA, THE SPACE OF TIME, 1998
National Museum of Roman Art 1 - Roman Aqueduct of Merida 2 - Nave of museum 3 - Street Facade 4 - Street perspective Igualada Cemetery 5 - Cemetery terraces against blue marls cliffs 66
1 Juhani Pallasmaa writes on Aalto’s Saynatsalo Town Hall that Aalto captures the sensations of a small mountainside village town. Navigating the town hall feels as if one is walking through a a small town. The town hall lacks the visual kitsch hallmarks of a village like gabled roofs or chimneys. The town hall resembles a village in its clustering of small buildings up and down a terraced slope with streetlike walks. Pallasmaa observes that architecture has more power when it taps into the physicality of a memory rather than its visual details. The National Museum of Roman Art exists in a town littered with vestiges of a Roman colony. The museum steals the sensations of Roman construction but none of the visual hallmarks. The museum imitates the mass, weight, verticality, and relentless repetition seen in the town’s Roman ruins,
4 but none of the exquisite detail of Roman ornament on display in the museum. Instead, the museum draws on our collective memories of Roman ruins as solemn structures whose details that been eroded away in time. At the urban scale, the museum aspires to the grandeur of the ruins but fits in seamlessly with the small
