Wondrous Pools | Re-use Italy Competition | Bacoli, Italy
This adaptive re-use of the Piscina Mirabilis near Naples aims to restore the water-harvesting function of the Ancient Roman cistern while also adapting it for use as a museum of contemporary art. The art galleries that comprise the museum are divided into a series of discrete pavilions, each of which is conceived as a figural abstraction of a historical typology of Italian hydrological architecture, including the bath, the well, the fountain, and the nymphaeum. The pavilions are embedded in the cistern and puncture its roof in order to allow rainwater and daylight to enter the space. The pavilions simultaneously choreograph the experience of the museum and of the public gardens on the cistern’s roof surface. The museum café on the roof is configured like a Roman domus, with its roof sloping toward the center in order to collect water for the cistern. It is a publicly accessible amenity oriented toward the roof gardens, which are irrigated by the rainwater collected in the cistern, and their lush vegetation therefore indexes the presence of the water hidden below. In this way, both the surrounding community of Bacoli and out-of-town museum visitors can intermingle and meet in the public gardens, and share the wealth of water collected there. Wondrous Pools organizes the collection, storage, and benefit of water into an atmospheric spectacle, producing a new museum that is forward-looking and, at the same time, which pays homage to the hydrological architectures of the past.
Project Data:
Client: Re-use Italy Competition
Year: 2020
Status: Unbuilt
Program: Art museum; public park
Team: Aurelie Frolet. David Shanks