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Fig. 1.
“Part Alta”
of Tarragona.
Interventions in the “Part Alta” of the Roman
City, Tarragona
Jordi casadevall dalMaU
Hello everyone,
First of all, I would like to thank the organisation for the invitation
to present our work and I hope that this will add to the conclusions
of the session.
The presentation I will explain is of a project that was carried out
by a group of architects from 1990 to 2000 and which was commissioned
by the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Council of Tarragona.
The members of the group were the architects: Jordi Segura, Jordi
Sarda, Xavier Romani, Estanislau Costa, Xavier Olivé and myself.
The commission basically consisted of trying to establish a method
or perhaps it is better to say the setting of certain criteria for the intervention
in urban projects in the public spaces of the “Part Alta” of
Tarragona, where the most significant part of the Roman legacy is
concentrated (fig. 1).
One of the objectives of the criteria was to show and explain to the
citizens and non-expert visitors, the Roman heritage embedded in
the fabric of the town.
It is not a project based on some visible excavated remains but in fact
a proposal about archaeological remains that are often hidden and in
a few cases unperceived due to the current surface data.
With a contemporary proposal, we also wanted that the work served
to continuously qualify the different spaces of the historical area,
always with a well defined objective.
The criteria of the proposal had to be clear and simple, non dogmatic
and openly flexible, to be able to incorporate at any moment
the latest archaeological discovery that had been hidden from us in
whatever street or square.
The rich Roman heritage of the Part Alta is centered in an area
delineated by the walls and sited on three stepped terrace platforms
containing the Circus, the Forum and the Temple.
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