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Fig. 1.
MAHE, excavations.
into the Archaeological Museum, with the “almost certain” loan of
the said work of art. Work on the palace was complex due to serious
structural problems. Moreover, it had to house the large collection
that would become the museum discourse while being a temporary
home for such an illustrious Lady, with strict security rules to be
followed. In addition to the palace-fortress, the City Hall had to
adapt the surrounding site.
This included landscaping the adjacent square, building an underground
parking area as well as an office building to house public
institutions. When the excavations for the square began, the remains
of an eleventh-century defence wall from the primitive, Almohad
city was uncovered. The palace-fortress has been built on these remains
(fig. 1). The construction company building the parking
area granted the City Hall the first floor as an exhibit area. Municipal
technicians and a team of archaeologists and historians decided
to use this area to install the City History Museum, with which,
together with the Altamira Palace, MAHE, meaning the Elche
Archaeological and History Museum, was created.
Going back to autumn of 2004: the phone rang at our studio in
Cuenca. The company handling the museum project wanted to
present a proposal to use audiovisuals in areas of the City Museum.
That area was quite large, and there were very few artefacts to fill it.
They had seen some of our projects where we had used audiovisuals
and thought that this could be a solution. A few days later, we
stopped by to take a look.
We were faced with two completely different buildings and in different
phases of construction. First, we visited the future City Museum.
It looked like an almost finished parking lot. A huge, empty
space, of double height, a ceiling made of prefab, concrete tiles. The
southern facade would be a huge glass wall so that the tenth-century
wall could be viewed. Across from that facade, on the north side,
there was a hefty reinforced concrete wall with a series of niches on
the lower half of the wall. It seemed that the structure responded to
the need to create oversized pots for the palm trees in the park just
above. You must remember that the Elche Palm Grove is a World
Heritage Site. The entry was on the east facade while to the west,
a series of arches had been recuperated. These arches connected
the patio of the former fortress with the eleventh-century facade.
We continued the visit at the Altamira Palace. The rehabilitation,
under the direction of Architect Antonio Serrano, was advancing
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