Description
It is an underground hydraulic complex more than two millennia old, located in the municipality of Porcra. Accidentally rediscovered by one of the inhabitants of the contemporary houses above him and used during the civil war as an anti-air shelter, it was originally a large public water tank with several years of rainwater collection and three catchment wells. Its construction, by means of walls and built-in pillars of cyclopean armchairs that support the architrabada deck with huge slabs of local calcarenita, makes it unique and unique at all levels.
Declared Good of Cultural Interest in 2014, the La Calderona tank in Porcra (Jaén) is a water tank in the Roman city of Obulco, which is presumed to be linked to a water infrastructure of themunicipum,Maybe public hot springs. In the time of the Roman Empire, the growth of the large walled city led to the area being covered with large stone pillars on which new constructions were settled, thus starting what became its final burial.
In the Spanish civil war the tank served as an anti-aircraft shelter. In a fortuitous way, there was a finding that put the experts on the track of the original infrastructure: as they went down to the ground to protect themselves from the bombing, the neighbors observed that the wells they had in their homes were part of a more complex structure.
After a long and complex restoration, the tank currently in operation has been opened to the public. In order to access the level of the deposit, the intervention required, first, to build a new building, to serve as a reception centre for visitors and to integrate in turn the helicoidal ramp of down with 100 meters suspended, that do not touch the archaeological remains. In order to locate the new construction, an empty area was taken advantage of, located on one of the margins of the nearest road, so that the houses located on the Roman complex were not affected. In this way, the search for access to the tank ended up generating as added in addition to the new construction, a bridge that crosses San Marcos street and a tunnel that passes below the houses.
The project, led by the architect Pablo Millán, is based on the interrelationship of opposite realities and that, in the face of complexity, proposes a discourse based on the simplicity of a clean, geometrically precise architecture that does not conflict with the heritage architecture, present both in the Roman tank and in all the domestic buildings that appear during the archaeological intervention. In front of the space under the railing, hidden, in which the light does not enter, there is a new clear and deafan space through which the visitor travels, establishing a dialogue between the archaeological heritage and contemporary architecture.
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