A house of the city, Tarragona, Spain

Tarragona is a city with a 2 year urban history, building up successive urban settlements literally on top of previous ruins. Its history reveals a city in section. It is proposed that the extreme sectional and chronological structure of this city might be “housed” as the construction site of both an archaeological excavation and the fabrication of urban models. One is therefore factual while the other is representational. The city already has a variety of "Houses" of History scattered from citadel to port as a consequence of previous discoveries/interventions into what was thought to be the anonymous fabric of the city that revealed the existence of a variety of urban fragments. The site for this project was chosen for its proximity to the new Cultural Center and because it is the only anonymous site available on the previously unexcavated 19th century Rambla. There are two organizational methods to be explored in this project, both sectional in character. One is to reveal the archaeological stratas (layers) through the .sectional excavation of the ground and the other is the fabrication of a tower to reveal the documentation of the evidence through urban models culminating in an observation platform to study the contemporary city