Piscina Mirabilis contemporary art museum, Italian Architecture, Historic Naples water reservoir
Piscina Mirabilis contemporary art museum, Naples
15 Aug 2020
Piscina Mirabilis contemporary art museum News
Architects: Vazio S/A
Location: Naples, southern Italy
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Piscina Mirabilis is an ancient water reservoir in Naples, Italy that will be converted into a new contemporary art museum. Built by emperor Augustus in the 1st century AD, the reservoir is one of the largest ancient Roman cisterns and was used by a nearby naval base that needed large quantities of fresh water for the ships and for the base itself.
This project is a competition entry submitted to Reuse Italy, an organization that aims to rehabilitate ancient buildings in Italy. The proposal by Vazio S/A explores the cistern’s hypostyle typology in two ways: using it as the theme of the inaugural exhibition, and imagining a new hypostyle hall that duplicates the existing hall.
The chosen exhibition theme is the isometries of cisterns by architect Livio Dimitriu. Stairwells, title of the drawings, is a meta-exhibition that will present illustrations of reservoirs within a reservoir.
The capacity of the Piscina was used as a tool to imagine a ?virtual reservoir? on the terrace: composed of 57 glass boxes, it is a new hypostyle hall designed from the voids of the Piscina. It is a matrix of the negative space of the cistern, where the perimeter of each box corresponds exac...