Faith is today lived in a certainly less definable way than in the past and, especially in the western world, in a way more and more personal and adverse to rules.
At the same time and somewhat inexplicably the relationship between faith and the physicality of the human experience is so strong that it can still resist the web and smartphones.
It was Christian Norberg Schulz who pointed out that it is through the act of building that man can understand his place and thus experience his life as meaningful.
And the meaning of life, actually, is the fundamental core of any religion.
The 14th century Madonna della Rosa Sanctuary rises on a hilltop south of Lake Iseo, overlooking the Po Valley. Less than a kilometre away from the village of Monticelli Brusati, the place is isolated, able to distance the visitor from his everyday life with its atmosphere's strength.
In an intervention spanning four years this complex has been restored as a centre for pilgrims and visitors, with a new contemporary extension built south of the complex for meetings and prayer and an additional approach path designed for disabled people.
The extension speaks of timelessness, in great balance with the historical building and the landscape. It is built as a walled structure with the same stone of the sanctuary, counterpointed by a wooden brise-soleil protecting a glass facade and covered with a green roof.
The aim of our design wanted to be the possibility to enhance the fruition of this space so public but at the same time so intimate, and to increase the strength of this ‘house of the spirit’, joining even more intimately than before the visitor’s meditation and reflection to the surrounding nature.
The new room is built adjacent to the ancient building, close to the garden placed behind the apse. Seen from the main churchyard and from the entrance, independent from that of the church, it seems a low building, almost hidden, built with the same stone of the sanctuary. The room has a second entrance from the garden behind the apse, that connects the new space more directly with the other spaces of the Sanctuary.
The main entrance leads to an intimate but wide-ranging space: the room opens the view towards the hills and the entire Po Valley through the glass façade filtered by wooden sunscreens.
So this closed space is ideally open and intertwined with the surrounding nature. These brise soleil, light and arranged in different directions, are an abstraction of trees, natural sunscreens to which we’ve got used all along.
The volume of the new building is in balance with those of the Sanctuary and of the close walled terraces and overlooks the vineyard below.
From this side the building looks light and natural, due to the material consonance with the historic building and the glass façade.
The new room is built with natural materials such as larch wood and local stone, split on the walls and polished on the floor, so to enhance the relationship with nature, in a way both visual and tactile.
