And fifteen hundred years after the Fall of Rome, Rafael Moneo gave a modern touch to the ancient structure in Mérida’s breathtaking National Museum of Roman Art, located on the site of the former Iberian outpost of Emerita Augusta. Engineers at Segovia and Nîmes incorporated them into their revolutionary aqueducts. Constantine, Titus, and Septimus Severus built them to commemorate their military victories. The light contrasts with the ghostly paleness, therefore the pastiness, of the antiquities on display.”Īrches have long been used to mark the greatest achievements of Roman civilization. As Robert Campbell wrote in a Pritzker retrospective of the architect, “the handling of the interior daylight is masterful, here an ever-changing golden wash. For Moneo, whose body of work displays remarkable stylistic variation, it is perhaps this careful and deliberate control of daylight that makes this building characteristically his. Walls, columns, and arches are made of the same material, but the appearance is far from monotonous patchworks of gold and red hues paint the walls in pixelated clusters of color, lit afire by the dramatic overhead lighting. Thin, elongated brickwork, distinctly non-Roman in its shape and perfect uniformity, gives the museum its trademark appearance. The article ArchDaily comments on his imaginative use of use of brick and light:
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