Designing by strata: notes from the underground. Hypogeous spaces and the archeological museum of Pompei. An architectural research and a tutorial workshop on hypogeum

The design approach tries to investigate some meanings of contemporary space for the ancient Pompeii from two ideas. The first concerns its plan and is founded on the idea of digging: it tends to shape the project by bringing to light the excavation implicit meaning, as leading the project. Enhances the primary value of the land masses moved (or eroded) or of the layers of time - and the substance - sectioned. Expresses the idea of unearthing - of what is hidden, buried in fact - or simply implicit (as a Michelangelo “Prison”). Continuing, then, by the concept of spatial progression (as initiatory matrix: “usque ad infera usque ad coelum”), implicit in ambivalent couples of light-shade, inside-out, over-under, featuring chthonic spaces, we continue to develop the second idea concerning the specific nature of the space of the project. The sequence of courts not always in axis of the domus, becomes - between a succession of underground tunnels (labyrinthine memory) and above ground paths - the alternation of passages that creep between the cores of the courts that cross the horizontal spatiality of the descent layers. The descent to the museum system, takes place, as in a well of time, alongside his various layers: from ‘today’ to the various archaeological levels, finally to the virgin soil. Galleries of underground ventilation (ground cooling) are the most technologically advanced system (and the oldest) as the most sustainable for the architectural system. The technological advancement lies in its appropriateness and correspondence to the formal and architectural system.