Musée Vesunna, site-musée gallo-romain (2003)
Ateliers Jean Nouvel
Périgueux
The domus (1st century AD), which led to the creation of the museum, was discovered in 1959 and listed as a historic monument in 1963. After a long period of excavations, an architectural competition was launched to design a museum, and it was won by Jean Nouvel in 1993.
Jean Nouvel describes his architectural project as follows:
“The aim is to highlight the site. What was very important was to protect it, to preserve its poetic quality as an archaeological site. The building is a kind of large umbrella […]. Moreover, I really like archaeological sites when they are preserved in a very natural and somewhat raw way […]. In this project, there is therefore a desire to make the whole easier to understand […] but also the wish to maintain this openness, this ‘lack of boundaries’ of the archaeological site. […] It is a construction that clearly uses the means of our time, with a fairly elaborate metal structure.”
(interview published in Le Festin, no. 23–24, before the start of construction)
The museum consists of two elements: the “thick wall,” a concrete block located at the north-west corner of the building, housing the reception area and the shop (which was not originally planned) on the ground floor, and collections related to the city of Périgueux on the upper floor; and the “large glazed canopy,” a vast glass structure enclosing the remains of the ancient site. Apart from its pillars, this structure has no foundations but is placed directly on the ground. It is topped by a roof that extends well beyond the walls. The ceiling is decorated with a reproduction of the domus plan painted by Alain Bony.
Commission by the French Ministry of Culture (2024) as part of the ‘Remarkable Contemporary Architecture’ label.
