AE29: Archaeological Covers

Less an architectural element than an odd sort of typology, archaeological covers serve multiple purposes: protecting ruins from the elements, particularly rain, and marking a historical site in a way that reinforces its cultural importance. The former could be accomplished through a tent-like structure, but the latter requires something more substantial in terms of form, material and detail. Here I highlight a few recent and historical examples.


[Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Casa Grande Ruins National Monument | Photo: Robert Young]

The below archaeological covers are exclusively European, which makes sense given the density of the continent (and therefore the inevitability of building on or near ruins) and the importance placed on history both for cultural and touristic reasons. Nevertheless, an early cover worth pointing out is the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument in Arizona. The second cover on the site was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (the son of the Central Park designer) and completed at the end of 1932. As Ronald Rael points out at Earth Architecture, this cover, which stands to this day, gives greater distance between it and the ruins than its predecessor, such that the ruins can be appreciated as a standalone entity rather than "an introverted and fragile piece of history, wrapped within the security of modernity."


[Sverre Fehn, Hedmark County Museum | Photo: Ilha Lee]

Yet, what distinguishes Olmsted's 80-year-old cover from the more recent examples collected here is the location of the visitor. Instead of traversing the same ground as the ruin, and therefore experiencing the ruin as an object in the landscape, covers like the Hedmark County Museum in Hamar, Norway, situate the visitor on walkways between the ruins below and new cover above. This shifting of the horizon – from ground that is shared to a new, built horizon that gives a God-like, if close-up gaze from above – is an important one for many architectural reasons, among them the spaces created and the role of walls. Forced to confront these considerations, the new covers can interact with the old ruins in ways that distinguishing the two is not always clear.


[Sverre Fehn, Hedmark County Museum | Photo source]

In the case of the Hedmark County Museum, which Fehn started working on in 1967 and continued until 2005, "the interior of the former [late-12th-century manor/]barn is now a constructed landscape," according to Per Olaf Fjeld in his monograph on the architect. Fjeld further writes: "New ramps and plateaus together with the ruins form a varied spatial sequence. The old structures remain untouched with the clear intention of allowing all paths and marks in the 'landscape' to continue their now slowed decay." Fehn's approach, as the other projects here indicate, had a strong influence on the typology of archaeological covers.


[Peter Zumthor, Protective Housing for Roman Archaeological Excavations | Photo: Felipe Camus]

A couple decades after Fehn started working on the museum in Hamar, Peter Zumthor realized one of his first projects, the Protective Housing for Roman Archaeological Excavations in Chur, Graubünden, Switzerland. Wood lamella walls follow the Roman outer walls, "producing a package-like effect which gives a visible form to the location of the Roman buildings in today's city landscape," per Zumthor in his 1998 monograph.


[Peter Zumthor, Protective Housing for Roman Archaeological Excavations | Photo: Felipe Camus]

Zumthor describes the modern steel footbridges running the length of the building as a "raised, a-historical observation level," from which visitors can descend to reach the level of Roman soil. Open-air like the Hedmark County Museum, the archaeological cover allows the sounds of the city to enter the interior, as well as the wind through the wood slats and the sun through dark skylights.


[Peter Zumthor, Kolumba | Photo: Andrew Carr]

Two decades later and Zumthor found himself designing a museum above the ruins of the Gothic church in the center of rebuilt Cologne, Germany. Unlike the previous examples, which cap the ruins with a roof, occupied space (art galleries) sits above the ruins at Kolumba. The line between the open-air archaeological cover at the museum above is visible in the distinction between the solid and the perforated custom Petersen bricks.


[Peter Zumthor, Kolumba | Photo: Andrew Carr]

Like Chur, the ruins in Cologne are traversed by bridges, in this case wending through the slender new columns supporting the building above. 


[Paredes Pedrosa, Public Library in Ceuta | Photo: Fernando Alda]

A similar tactic can be found in the Public Library in Ceuta, Spain by Paredes Pedrosa, although the existence of the 14th-century Arab ruins below the building cannot be grasped from the surrounding streets.


[Paredes Pedrosa, Public Library in Ceuta | Photo: Fernando Alda]

One must enter the building to be confronted by the ruins, which are overlooked by lecture rooms and other library spaces.


[Savioz Fabrizze Architectes, Coverage of Archaeological Ruins of the Abbey of St. Maurice | Photo: Thomas Jantscher]

The last pair illustrates a third technique: Translucent canopies that shade and protect the ruins while leaving the sides open. The Coverage of Archaeological Ruins of the Abbey of St. Maurice in Switzerland covers a gap between the Abbey and a cliff face in a dramatic fashion – 170 tons of stone sit atop the translucent surface like horizontal gabions.


[Savioz Fabrizze Architectes, Coverage of Archaeological Ruins of the Abbey of St. Maurice | Photo: Thomas Jantscher]


[Amann, Cánovas y Maruri, Cubierta de El Molinete | Photo: David Frutos]

The last project is ACM Arquitectura's cover "protecting the remains of a Roman assembly (thermal baths, forum and domus) in the archaeological site of Molinete Park in Cartagena, Spain." Perforated steel plates sandwich the long-span structure to create a solid white cover during the day and a glowing lantern-like cover at night.


[Amann, Cánovas y Maruri, Cubierta de El Molinete | Photo: David Frutos]

AE28: Inverted Topographical Fins

One architectural element I've noticed in a few retail and dining establishments lately is what I'm calling "inverted topographical fins," which are made from tightly spaced parallel strips of wood that vary from one strip to another to create contours. It's a tactic that can be seen in perpendicular and larger form in Studio Gang's Aqua Tower. Formal gestures like these always take me back to a Shinkenchiku competition from the 1990s, in which the winner reconsidered Philip Johnson's Glass House by making a box of parallel planes of glass where the "rooms" were created by the change in the openings cut in each pane. (A realized project in this vein is the Laminata House.) But divorced from the wider architectural concerns (facade, structure, weather, etc.) of those precedents, the below three projects are free to use the wood to shape space and create a certain ambiance through the contours and varying degrees of transparency, depending on one's orientation to the fins.



[Spar Supermarket in Budapest by LAB5 | Photos: Zsolt Batár | Via Dezeen]

A portion of LAB5's design for Spar Supermarket uses the inverted topographical fins to display wine bottles and "to create a unique atmosphere," as they intended. Some of the fins "curl up" at the wall, allowing the shelving in between the planes to be of a more suitable dimension. The dark structure and systems above the ceiling accentuates the latter's contours, while the lighting creates dimples in the contours in some areas.



[Banq Restaurant in Boston by NADAAA | Photos: John Horner | Via World-Architects]

NADAAA describes the ceiling in the aptly named Banq Restaurant (housed in the old Penny Savings Bank) as "a landscape, undulating in relation to the [mechanical] equipment they conceal overhead." Like Spar, the undulating slats extend to the floor at times, covering columns and walls and making the expression all the more extensive.



[Pastry Shop in Gondomar, Portugal, by Paulo Merlini | Photos: João Morgado]

Architect Paulo Merlini focused on luring people into this pastry shop from outside, thereby focusing on light and the ceiling as the means of doing so. Further he determined that the design should "break the sound waves and refract the light," to creating a pleasing space to be in. The strips of wood "melt" in some areas to resemble cake topping, according to the architect, hopefully spurring the customers to buy some pastries through the association.

Update 01.11: Thanks to an anonymous commenter, here's a much earlier precedent, Isamu Noguchi's lobby design for 666 Fifth Avenue:




Update 01.14: It's worth showing dECOi's OneMain Street (Boston, MA) office refurbishment, thanks to another anonymous comment:

AE27: Honeycomb Oculi

Nature has a good way of explaining to us humans how things can be structured. Think trees, termite mounds, beehives, the list goes on and on. A couple recent projects made me think of the latter -- beehives -- for the way they are structured with hexagonal, honeycomb like modules. Neither regular nor mimicking beehives, these two projects have another interesting thing in common: at the apex of each cell, if you will, is a round opening, an oculus that makes each the enclosure porous.

The first project is the Picoroco Wall from Emerging Objects (design by onald Rael, Virginia San Fratello, Seong Koo Lee):


It is a freestanding wall system with a "variegated pattern [that] allows for views and light to pass through in some areas of the wall, but not in others." The front (above and below) lets the cones and holes come to the fore, but the underlying geometry is apparent where the aggregated pieces meet.



But it's the back of the 3d-printed wall (below) where we can see the structural geometry: hexagons, but also pentagons and the occasional trapezoid. A regular orthogonal grid of vertical and horizontal pieces add additional structural support.



The second project is the “Pavilion for one Summer” by Manuel Fabian Hartmann and his team from the University of Innsbruck:


Unlike the Picoroco Wall, this installation was constructed free of CNC, robotic, and other hi-tech techniques. This isn't to say computers did not play their part, for the modeling of the form was derived in the computer, with help from Buro Happold. After finding a decent pavilion form, the class researched "so-called D-Forms or simple curved surfaces, [and] 30 D-Forms were arranged in a voronoi-pattern on the generated form. By intersecting these forms with each other and the main form, the corresponding structure was developed."



Underlying the whole design are the hexagonal elements that bow out to the round openings. Therefore the pavilion is less about shelter from the elements (as the name makes clear, it was constructed and meant for only one summer) than in creating an enclosure that changes one's way of seeing the surrounding landscape of Alberschwende in Vorarlberg, Austria.



Believing that other projects must use what I'm calling "honeycomb ocluli," I searched the Internet and found the Shellstar Pavilion by Matsys (photos by Dennis Lo):


The way this installation in Hong Kong encloses space is similar to the pavilion in Austria (both were modeled similarly on the computer via D-Forms), but here we see the introduction of structural elements: ribs span from one clustered base to another. The secondary structure of the hexagons (below) is made by the exterior panels themselves, which are folded down and zip-tied together. 



But are the arching ribs necessary? Yes, to achieve this particular form. But as the time-lapse video of the construction process below shows, the hexagonal pieces, once clipped together, are quite malleable and lightweight, meaning they can be hung, draped, or structured to enclose space in a variety of ways.