New architectures facing the past: the new library and the old market in Bergamo, the Casa dos Vinte e Quatro in Porto

In 1910 for practical and sanitary reasons the municipality moved the fruit and vegetables market near the railway line, in a more suitable place than the central piazza Pontida. The new market was formed by 5 pavilions and a small office building, all disposed in an elliptical pattern around a central courtyard, following the project made by the engineer G. Vertova, with the cooperation of architect E. Pirovano. The market was abandoned in 1970 and the northern pavilions were demolished: only the office building and the two southern pavilions were left, although with very bad maintenance conditions, until the construction of the new public library, designed by the architect Mario Botta. His project aimed to reorganize the space of the old marked, adding a new big cubic volume containing the library with some spaces devolved to deposits and parking around the courtyard facing the survived portion of the market, but only the main body of the library was built and opened in 2004. Finally, beginning of 2022, the works started in order to reuse the south east pavilion as reading room for the library, trying to connect the new library to the old market: but the contrast of the volume and the overall dimensions, the position in which the new library connect to the residual spaces remains very problematic, and the only connection seems to be a beautiful garden that took the place of the central space of the old market, were both the library and the old pavilions are facing. We will try to investigate and discuss not only the value of the new architecture in itself, but also the way by the new building is in relationship with the existing remains of architecture from the past: the tower-house of Twenty Four built by Fernando Távora in Porto will be used as comparison, not for similarity of functions or importance of the building, but aiming to understand the different approaches of the two architects to the design.