Occidens Museum | Spain | 2013 - THE [RADICAL] PROJECT

[Vaillo+Irigaray Architects]

OCCIDENS is not an exhibition; it’s a reflection about the West. West is neither a civilization nor a geography, but a mental territory.

Occidens museum takes place into the Pamplona’s cathedral complex, crossing various spaces of different times: archaeological excavations , Romanesque palace, XI c, Archbishop’s Palace XII c, and the gothic constructions of the Archdeacon palace of the XIV-XVI c.

NARRATIVE PROJECT AND VARIOUS ATMOSPHERES
The Museum is conceived as a narrative project closer to a cinematographic discipline than to the conventional schemes of the museum through a discourse deployed through different frames and different reading levels: signs, images, objects, sounds, text, projections, codes, smells and atmospheres …

The project enhances the relationship between content-continent, between architecture and artworks by devising different atmospheres appropriate to each time and each space.

STEEL CARPET- GUIDING THREAD
The unity of the museum –composed of architectures of different times- is achieved by using a carpet of steel that meanders through the various rooms of millenarian architectures floating between archaic atmospheres without touching the footprints of the past, giving unity to the whole exhibition.

The project is implemented by a single resource: a carpet of steel that works as a guiding thread of the whole exhibition sits, without touching, winding through the different rooms from different times. A single resource, flexible and ambivalent, is able to realize its potential to generating an iconography able to provide homogeneity to an uneven set in time and space.

A black steel plate 1cm thick is bent and drilled to become gangway, pavement, bench, lamp, exhibitor… the drilled texts explain while lighting, guiding and giving content to the travel. Text description by the architects.