Sedimentação e Metamorfose. Projecto de recuperação e reintegração de traçados e estruturas construídas romanas em Bobadela, Portugal

The impossibility of having absolute control over the shape of the city, sends the plan and project into a more modest dimension and a fragmentary contribution to the permanent evolution of the object. It is from this perspective that we envisage the intervention of the architect and that we must understand the two projects that are here presented, the recovery of the churchyard and the rehabilitation of the Roman amphitheatre of Bobadela, located in the district of Coimbra, in the inland centre of Portugal. These interventions merely represent another moment in the long life of the two built structures. The remaining structures of the ancient forum of the Roman city, whose name is still unknown, have an evident presence in the central area of the town and are integrated in the churchyard, built structure of the church, manor houses and other buildings with vernacular characteristics. The intervention was based on a strengthening of the reading of the forum. Thus, the solution was based on laying and restoring pavements within the precise boundaries of the forum, distinguishing them from exogenous pavements to the Roman structures, creating connections between Roman and contemporary elements. The rehabilitation project of the Amphitheatre took on substantially different characteristics. The mission was to “conserve, restore and improve the visiting conditions of the Roman ruins”. The consolidation and restoration of the amphitheatre was aimed at the protection and conservation of the Roman structures, in a context that allowed for the reinforcement of the reading of the object and its visit and effective use to stage events. The intervention took a more restrained path that considered the consolidation of the podium walls considering the gradual dismantlement of this element, while never losing the definition of the arena. The inability of having complete control over an object like the city is too evident and the importance of time in its making cannot be neglected given that it is in permanent evolution. In this sense, we can synthesize the process of evolution of the built city through two essential phenomena: sedimentation and metamorphosis.

Keywords: urban morphology, urban fabric, urban sedimentation, archaeological enhancement, Bobadela