Museo Memoria de la Ciudad

The Museum of the Memory of the City (Museo Memoria de la Ciudad) is located in the Viola House (Casa Viola), one of the nine buildings that make up the architectonic complex Manzana de la Rivera, in front the Government house, in Asunción, capital of Paraguay. This Museum was an idea of the architect Carlos Colombino, and was inaugurated on 14 August 1996. a journey through its different spaces will allow to make a reading of Asuncion’s history, in its different phases of development. The objects that it treasures had been collected in the country, as well as in the cities of New York City, Madrid, París, Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

CASA VIOLA

The house Viola is a Typical colonial construction dated from 1750–1758, its location answers to the disposition of the streets before doctor Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia squared the city. The house has a tile roof. There is a gallery in front; behind the gallery there is a blacksmith’s shop built over wooden beams and columns. Previously, the house had three big rooms, now there’s only one, located in front of the government. In the back part there is a passing gallery, as a sample of the culata yovai, type of antique Paraguayan houses. The roof is made of palm and tacuara; the tiles are set with a mud kind of cement.

Alter the change of government in 1989, people wanted to restore few places in town. In this context, a group of architecture students Start the campaign "Salvemos la Manzana frente al palacio" which means "let’s save the block in front of the government palace", due to the damage of the construction and in opposition to a project that pretend to demolish to build a park in its place. Due to the celebration of the 500 years of America’s discovery, there were established through all Iberoamerica some commissions to organize few actions about it. The Comisión V Centenario Paraguay, presided by the architect Juan Cristaldo, includes the Project Casa Viola, among the principal projects to be done, which was presented by the writer Augusto Roa Bastos in front of the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional (Spanish agency of international cooperation). During the administration of the mayor José Luis Alder, Asuncion’s town hall acquired the property that of in the property of the Manzana. The restoration works started in 1991, year in which the buildings started to function again to turn it into the cultural centre of the city. Its first principal was the architect Carlos Colombino. The visit to this Museum allows a double reading through one of the facts that happened since the foundation of the city, and another one through the chronicles of its protagonists. In the Museum we can appreciate different ritual elements appertaining to the guarani culture, as a pre-Hispanic undertaker’s. there’s also a genealogical tree of enlightened men and women of the nation, paintings of lots of Paraguayan artists, that reflect the way of living in Asunción through the different periods, geographical maps, statistics and historicals, city maps of Asunción and the neighbor countries, from the 17th and 18th centuries, furnitures, journals, books, shields, magazines, scores, candlesticks, colonial objects, as various building elements. In the year 2005, with the sponsoring of the United States embassy, the conservation and restoration Project of the heap started.

...
Wikipedia