VOLUBILIS VISITOR’S CENTER

The visitor’s center at Volubilis, Moroco, is very good.

It is always interesting to be presented with a visitor’s center when traveling.  Of course, visitor’s centers are built at popular tourist destinations.  These centers are typically built at popular historic sites.  One of their uses, of course, is to present the background and contextural information so that what you are about to see makes sense.

So you go to the site with all of your preconceived expectations that you got from the travel books.  And then to get to the historic site, you have to engage with a visitor’s center.  And then architects being architects, we end up making evaluations of the center as you proceed thru it.

We really liked the Volubilis center.  The building was cut into sloping topography, so that from the parking lot, you could not see the building.  As you proceeded down a gentle stair, you came to the realization that you were slowly entering the center.

The built forms were simple rectangular blocks, distributed across the hillside.  The materials were concrete, wood and glass.  The forms were restrained yet had a subtle power to them.  It was almost as if the center was found as a result of archaeologic excavations, which is just how the Volubilis site was found.

It is refreshing to see visitor’s centers like these.  They have been designed to be unobtrusive, yet they do make an architectural statement.  They are all what would be called modern, yet they fit the site and the history of the site perfectly.  None of them are done by a famous architect.  Yet they are absolutely first rate.

Could you imagine if this were built in the US.  And because the Volubilis site is Roman, the powers that be would state that the building would need to respond to the Romanness of the ruins?  This is just a good building precisely because it does not reference any specific historical contect.

In my drawing above, I thought first about using the Transparent Drawing Choisey One Point.  But I thought it would mean more if I was looking down.  And as I was utilizing essentially a one point projection system, looking down, the question occurred to me;  as long as it is transparent, what’s the difference if you look up or down?  So I guess I have to come up with a term that addressed a one point perspectival projection, looking either up or down.