With its project, BeAr proposes something more than a building, a museum-garden and a story-telling space that, in addition to solving the programmatic exhibition needs, captivates the public with connections and references to culture and history that propose a creative vision of a nostalgic place closely linked to the natural landscape in which it is located.
The project involves the transformation of a modern, unused ruin surrounded by a rich landscape into a proud and modern enclave that highlights the spirit of the place.
Based on a succession of open and closed spaces, pavilions and hidden corners made mostly from wooden structures, the museum welcomes, through a romantic look and by recovering and improving the fragments of the old building, a proposal that relates the particular with the global of the music of Basque folklore.
Museum of Basque Folk Music, MUSIKTOPA by BeAr. Photograph by Luis Díaz Díaz.
Project description by BeAr
“Regional character is a property of any authentic architecture.” (1)
The genius loci or spirit of place is one of the classic concerns that has haunted architecture since ancient times. This search for local or traditional specificity helps to provide a sense of belonging and security that invites the collective appropriation of public spaces. The separation of their romantic condition and their playful and unprejudiced mix of the real, the intended and the crude imitation is what is sought here. A popular, open and somewhat punk tradition.
When in 1944 Sigfried Gideon published his famous article entitled “The need for a new monumentality” he opened a new path towards a general problem: the need for meaning in architecture. This search for “something” that goes beyond mere functionality is a statement towards an architecture that chooses to absorb the qualities of the environment and translate what it sees into meaningful images. An architecture that flies and proposes a new imagination (2) with which to tie itself to its surroundings and at the same time propose a journey beyond it.
Artea and its new Folk Music Museum are a crouching enclave, hidden under the great mountain and forgotten by the passage of time, converted into modern ruins of buildings without use or interest, but surrounded by a powerful landscape. Its adequate updating must be a trigger of the latent energies there, where to display and proudly show its oak groves, corners, its tradition and musical culture, overcoming the notion of building in a proposal of cultural and natural landscape.
An architecture more phenomenological than scientific.
The picturesque path (3) opens as an alternative path to allow us that free flight, which beyond disciplinary and thought limits, organizes space as a successful sequence of narratives where the visual amplifies, through movement, the invisible and immaterial.
Musiktopa recovers the fragments of nature, walls and corners of the old museum, linking them together and building pavilions, furniture, living and dead nature around them. A proposal that does not seek isolated or superfluous motifs, but rather effective methods of spatial organization capable of relating the particular to create a compelling action program that, from a global understanding, defines a particular solution to the program.
Thus, it proposes something more than a building, a garden, a storyteller, which not only boldly resolves the programmatic need, but also captures the citizen with connections and references to reality, culture and history, proposing a vision of a new regionalism that is creative rather than nostalgic and that places the proposal in its environment.
(1) Christian Norberg-Schulz, “The principles of modern architecture” (Ed. Reverté. Barcelona, 2005. Spanish version). Chapter VII: The new regionalism, page 185.
(2). Sigfried Gideon, “The new regionalism” (Architectural Record, 1954) p. 38 et seq.
(3). Iñaki Ábalos.
