Vigo: Museum of the Sea

The Maritime Museum is a work of extraordinary interest because it is one of the last projects of the late architect Aldo Rossi, done in collaboration with the National Architecture Prize, Galician César Portela. The Maritime Museum is the only Rossi performing in Spain. The investment is 17 million euros.

The project may distinguish six parts: the garden, a set of five ships rehabilitated (of which three are for museum and two workshops and storage of materials), a cobbled square that allows communication between the beaches there to two sides, a new building constructed on the edge of a reclaimed plot, and a spring that is located in an aquarium, a boat mooring and a historic lighthouse signaling. Both Rossi and Portela always described as the sixth element. the sea that surrounds and bathes the entire performance.

Portela is Caesar himself who describes his work: "In this project urbanized spaces, whether they are rehabilitated as the new plant, and the gaps between them are formed, besides receiving a singular architectural treatment, conceived forming part of a higher order: The Maritime Museum of Galicia. This set behaves like an urban piece that serves as a transition between the Earth and the Sea, and is configured as a corporal, half Nature, Artifice half, paradigmatic place in this coastal edge, near the city of Vigo, which incorporates the Estuary as a part of the project, certainly more important.

The Maritime Museum of Galicia, is conceived as a single, unambiguous spatial domain identifiable as the role requires that houses and uniqueness of the place in which it is located, bounded in part by a perimeter wall and partly by the sea itself, and full turn smaller spaces, equipped with strong roots and personality, which has room for the most diverse uses that the program provides, and as they happen, they create sequences capable of transporting through gardens, buildings, courtyards, plazas, promenades, walkways, docks ..., from the mainland to Orillamar. And all this without showing the slightest dysfunction or imbalance, but rather, making a continuous harmonious place in which functions are most rigorous and the most playful, and where public and private spaces occur, combine and merge as parts of a whole, where time and space are at the service of culture and nature.

The work as a whole, is a scenario that is known incomplete without the presence of users: museum visitors, who in their travels through the different areas, delimited by walls and covered when closed, or simply by walls when are open, and in their approach or their departures to holes in them practiced, complete the museum's exhibition discourse, with the enjoyment of the sea and the sky behind them, are offered in all its immensity and beauty.

The walls, stone factory, limit enclosures that sometimes become facades, which a close and other times the sea away, but always defend the winds and rains that often reach the level of temporary and rages from the mouth of the estuary. The approach to the landscape or the departure is due to these openings in the walls, which according to its position and format, unusual and varied visions fall, and become the principal and, no doubt, in the most real and rich material that museum The museum offers.

The windows are fitted with geometry as eyes awned, capturing scenes of the sea, where they are found, the frame, appropriated them, and close the offer visitors like a collection of pictures is involved. But all this does not stop being a mirage, for the sea, which seems to get caught and offered in this diverse series of frames or windows, that simulate wall voids, is still alive and free, doing its job, and letting sail incessantly by boats, sailors and sailors who live in it and of it.

The entire building complex, consisting of two families of ships and buildings and an elevated walkway that connects them, can be considered an observatory from which to view and enjoy the sea, while their interiors are traversed.But older, and in addition to these, we have designed a series of outdoor spaces of different size, shape and functionality: plazas, courtyards, galleries, balconies, gardens ..., located at strategic points in the set. Their different location, and the particular type and proportion of each, allows unique visions and different, all unique complementary exterior landscape: the Mar. The Patio de la Palmera, the Mirador de Poniente, the Plaza del Puerto, the Windward Square, Gallery of the Taberna del Puerto, the Patio de Sotavento, the Plaza del Faro and the viewpoints of the base or the Lantern, also the lighthouse, form a constellation of sites, that allows every visitor finds his own ".

Situation:
Vigo. Pontevedra

Structure:
Antonio Martinez Reboreda

Facilities:
Carmelo Luis Duran and Freire

Construction Management:
Cesar Portela
Arturo Conde
Rodrigo Portanet

Technical Architects:
Jose Antonio Suarez Portiño
Alberto Iglesias Loredo

Promoter:
Consortium of the Zona Franca of Vigp

Manufacturing company:
Entecanales Necso Covers

Budget:
10.? 818,217

Source: Liceus

Source: Enllave

Source: Maritime Museum