Copan Museum of Artifacts
Open Storage Concept
Open Storage Concept
An archaeological museum must tell a story through a collection of objects. This story is often told chronologically or thematically, unfolding from room to room along a prescribed visitor path. Supporting this curated story comprised of the most beautiful and complete objects, are countless variants, shards, and remainders, packed in storage warehouses, each carrying fragments of incomplete stories. This concept design for a new Archaeological Museum in Copan, Honduras, proposes an open storage system that brings this vast body of artifacts to public view and frees visitors to create their own trajectories and narrative sequences through the material record.
Mayan rulers built their pyramidal tombs on top of the tombs of their ancestors, creating a series of chronological strata.
The ringed layout of the proposed museum plan mirrors this tomb structure, so as visitors move from exterior to center, they encounter progressively older artifacts, recreating the experience of archaeological excavation.
The ring layout is defined by thickened walls that serve to both display and store artifacts recovered from the Copan excavations. Each ring of walls corresponds to a major dynastic period in Mayan history (2500BC~1500AD); each quadrant of the square plan may be curated thematically.
The thickened wall modules are precast concrete with inset glass and wood, providing thermal mass and conduits for localized climate control where necessary. The flat roof is a translucent polycarbonate sandwich framed by structural gutters that drain to a water feature at the museum center.
Omission of wall modules from the ring layout creates open rooms for temporary curatorial narratives that cut across time, space, and thematic boundaries.
The site, 1km from the Copan excavations.
The plan cuts a gravel courtyard into the low hill, framing the exposed concrete walls of the artifact museum.
