Cobriment del jaciment de la Fornaca

previous state

In the 1980s, during urban development works on a new residential sector to the east of the historic centre of Vilassar de Dalt, the excavators came across an old potter's oven which ended up giving its name to the whole Fornaca district. The archaeological prospections and excavations carried out between 2002 and 2003 uncovered two adjacent ovens which could be dated to the late Roman period. This was a pottery producing centre in the 3rd century AD, excavated on a high quality clay site fed by a stream and right beside a good highway of the time which, still conserved today, is known as the Mataró Road.

Two of the three ovens belong to a typology that emerged in the 4th millennium BC in the Near East and was widespread all over the Roman Empire. They are ovens with two superimposed chambers. The lower chamber, used for combustion, is circular and covered by a bunch of radial arches that spring from the perimeter wall and converge in a central column. This structure is the support for the upper chamber, used for baking the clay. In the third oven, which belongs to a less common typology and comes from Minoan Crete, the combustion and the baking share a single space covered by a large semispherical vault. In 2003, once the archaeological tasks were at an end, the site was left exposed to the weather, overlooking undeveloped land on the lower boundary of the district where it meets an industrial sector.

intervention object

At that time, Vilassar de Mar City Council promoted an intervention designed to preserve the archaeological remains from the inclement weather and the urban development pressure surrounding them. For this reason, a museum space was built to cover them as well as a small park to bring order to the surrounding terrain.

intervention description

The three ovens now rest in the shelter of a large slab nine metres high. On the exterior, the slab is a terrace with views of the park and the sea. Three large cylindrical skylights above each of the ovens give a glimpse of them from the terrace. Beneath the slab there is a large chamber bounded by the slopes of the archaeological dig itself, where the three ovens are illuminated by imposing rays of natural light that fall vertically from the skylights. An imposing rectilinear wall of gabions filled in with blocks of granite has been erected on the only side which is not closed off by the slopes. Two large vertical cracks divide the wall into three panels and allow additional natural light to enter the oven chamber. On the central panel is the door, a polished reflecting metal cube which stands out from the level of the gabions.

intervention valuation

Therefore, a site of outstanding archaeological importance has been discovered and then covered again. In addition to guaranteeing the conservation of the remains, this paradoxical action gives them the sumptuous coating they deserve and allows them to be seen in a neutral context stripped of references to time and space. From the interior, the chamber is a hermetic, sacred space that protects the site from banality. From the exterior, it generously reveals its beautiful contents to occasional visitors to the park and is a public facility that endows a peripheral district with cultural specificity. And so now that the initial restrictions of access to the chamber (which aroused some protests from the local residents) have been overcome, the intervention today generates a focus of attraction in Fornaca.

David Bravo Bordas, architect