< back

Outdoor spaces Port Museum in Trieste

description
Detailed and final proposal

The Polo Museale del Porto di Trieste, located in the northern area of the Old Port, is set up in all the new functions hosted by the ex hydrodynamics plant and the ex electric substation.

The project involves the redesigning of the external spaces between the two buildings to complete a new identity for the museum area, characterizing it with a clear vocation of public space and openness to the city.

Outside the buildings, in order to qualify the spaces between them and the existing warehouses n. 26 and n. 27, the intervention providedfor a new pavement in Rosso di Verona stone grit in place of the preexisting asphalt.

The entire area is transformed into a walk dedicated to the Museum Complex of the Port of Trieste, an installation composed of portions of the old existing bollards, designed to recreate the image of an ideal waterfront. Each bollard is encircled by a metal ring with an external diameter of approx. 3.50 m. These rings quote actual solicitations for electricians, machinists, sailors, electricians, and other laborers, as advertised in the local paper from the early 20th century. This creates a sort of memory path recalling these laborers and the main routes of commercial traffic in the Old Port of the city of Trieste.

To delineate the space of the intervention, we constructed two pieces. The first is a sign on the southern facade of the Hydrodynamic Power Station, two metres high and made of cor-ten steel, that indicates the entrance to the new museum area. Designed to make the site recognisable from far away, it has a bronze logo consisting of the initials of the names of the two buildings, re-proposed with a redesigned font inspired by the lettering of the original inscriptions on the machinery kept inside the hydrodynamics plant. This new “totem” finds further articulation with the formation of the second piece, an extended bench about sixty metres long, which maintains the visual permeability of the spaces but also works as a separation between the museum area and the adjacent road.