Franco-Brazilian architect Elizabeth de Portzamparc has completed a museum of Roman history in the French city of Nîmes featuring glazed facades intended to recall the draped fabric of a toga.
The Musée de la Romanité stands opposite a Roman amphitheatre on the edge of the city's Écusson district, where it straddles the ruins of a Roman rampart.
De Portzamparc's Paris-based studio designed the 9,100 square metres building to exhibit around 5,000 of the museum's 25,000 archaeological artefacts.
Photo by Nicolas BorelThe building is positioned at the junction where the medieval and modern districts of Nîmes once met. This setting informed a design that functions as a gateway linking the neighbouring buildings with a public square surrounding the amphitheatre through a series of axes and openings. The museum's form and materiality offer a contemporary contrast to the ancient amphitheatre, with its fluid and diaphanous glass surfaces in tension with the Roman building's monumentality and structural rigour.
Photo by Stéphane Ramillo"A very light architectural design, made possible by current technology, seemed an obvious choice to me," de Portzamparc explained, "as well as the need to express the differences between the two periods through an honest dialogue based on their complementarity."
"On the one hand," she added, "a round volume surrounded by vertical Roman arches in stone and solidly anchore...