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Rusty Steel Cylinders Create Prizewinning Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo

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The 1st prize for the Interactive Museum of the History of Lugo was won by the Spanish architectural firm Nieto Sobejano.

The museum, photographed by Roland Halbe and Fernando Alda, is intended to become a point of arrival for visitors to the historic Roman city, and a reminder of Lugo’s recent industrial past.

Gigantic cylinders bring light down below ground. Oxidized steel, allowed to weather naturally is a reminder of the city’s recent industrial past.

Like the museum itself, the parking area for visitors is completely hidden out of sight under the undulating cover of vegetation, making it an environmentally sensitive design.

The Visitor Centre is all on a single floor underground, and daylit through large circular courtyards, which allow natural light to penetrate and permit independent, controlled use. Earth around the walls of the museum also contributes thermal inertia, thus reducing the need for energy use for heating and cooling.

In open areas underground, these circular wells of light serve to bring the abundant warmth of daylight down from today’s skies, rimmed in the rusty steel of Lugo’s recent industrial past, to the area of the exhibits of the past.

The experience would be almost like burrowing back through time under the earth – like an archeological dig.

After viewing the exhibits in the museum, essentially experiencing the past of Lugo, then you would walk up to ground level – and the present day.

The architects say “The new Museum will entail the experience of a walk through a vegetative, metallic landscape, a luminous field whose night-time glow will seem to emerge from within the earth. The Lugo Museum will evoke images of fields and caves, walls and fortified towers –metaphors of a landscape and a culture that the inhabitants of Lugo carry within their own memory”.