National Museum of Roman Art

Moneo was commissioned in 1979 and built between 1980 and 1986 on a site that turned out to contain a substantial part of Roman Mérida, including a road and houses. Rather than clear the remains or float above them, he set a series of parallel brick walls across the excavation, following the Roman grid, and let the archaeology stay in a crypt directly beneath. Above, those same walls are opened by tall semicircular arches, so that the visitor moves down a nave with aisles and top light — a Roman construction logic rather than a Roman style, since there are no orders, no cornices and no imitation. The brick is a thin Roman format laid with almost no mortar joint, which gives the interior its striped, dry, quarried quality. The building was widely read as the moment Spanish architecture returned to international attention after Franco, and Moneo dedicated it to his father, who died during the works.