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Description of the project by Massimo Mazzone
During the last decade we have assisted to interesting trials in architecture conducted through the use of container modules as material for the realization of public urban spaces, trade areas and temporary stores. The image of containers was stereotypically connected to freight transport by ship and rail or, in the worst cases, to the temporary trailers for refugees.
Nevertheless, at a certain point this structure was transformed in a legitimate and appreciated constructive base by several architects with radical intentions, often involved in experimentations on self-build and always in search of new solutions: we are referring to authors such as Shigeru Banor Santiago Ciruleda as well as Lot-Ek and Luca Stasi by Ctrl+Z, authors who have given to the container module a new dignity by making it, from the industrial rejection it appeared, the symbol of a new environmental awareness.
Even the Fabbrica del Sole in Arezzo, one of the world’s leading company in the field of renewable energy, realized extremely efficient off grid modules — so efficient that their domestic use still isn’t regulated by laws. The container module represents, therefore, an element that links architecture with ecology (intending, with this term, environmental as well as social ecology).
The Tunisian project we are dealing with is somehow part of this trend: it consists in a temporary museum formed by 21 elements alternate in vertical and horizontal position, apparently demanding the sun and the zenith light to cooperate with architecture.
The exhibition realized in May presented doctrinal and symbolic references to a new perspective of pan-Arabism, but looking beyond the exposition itself (despite its interesting approach) what we would like to pay attention to is the architectural syntax of the dismountable building that hosted it.
The most interesting element is definitely the space and the course inside it, its series of ups and downs, its stairs, the relation between the inside and the outside, the neo-constructivist development of the wide, rectangular area. Here, the spatial dialogue is intensive, marked by a rhythm that goes beyond the mere functional composition, towards an elegy of the form. AIR has originally designed the complex in its entirety, engineering, at the same time, the modularization of the building, transforming it then in a great example of architectural prêt-à-porter, in an emblematic module capable of being transferred in any urban or suburban environment without losing its identity nor its profound meaning —which is, being a contemporary art space that points the way to tacit knowledge transfer.
Last but not least the terraces, obtained wherever possible, increase the structure’s environmental report with the landscape and the buildings around —at this turn the Chartaginian ruins, maybe tomorrow other cities and busy metropoles.
