Convent Saint François renovation and extension by Amelia Tavella Architectes. Photography by Thibaut Dini.
Convent Saint François renovation and extension by Amelia Tavella Architectes. Photography by Thibaut Dini.
Project description by Amelia Tavella Architectes
I believe in higher and invisible forces. The Convent Saint-Francois of Sainte-Lucie de Tallano, built in 1480, is part of this belief. Housed at a height, on its promontory, it was a defensive castle before being a place of prayer, or retreat, chosen by monks aware of the absolute beauty of the site. Faith rallies to the sublime.
With his back to the cemetery, he overlooks the village he is watching. It has a front and a backstage. An olive grove is like a collar at its feet, a happy garden of heavenly food. In front of him, the spectacle of the Corsican mountains. Here pulses the heart of Alta Roca.
The beauty there is religious and supernatural.
Nature has grown inside the building, Siamese nature slipped between the stones and then transformed into plant armor that protects against erosion and collapse. A fig tree is included in the facade. The wood and the roots became structural and replaced the lime. An essential component of the historic monument, we have honored this nature which will have long protected the dormant building before its resurrection.
Convent Saint François renovation and extension by Amelia Tavella Architectes. Photography by Thibaut Dini.
I chose to keep the ruins and replace the torn part, the phantom part, in copper work which will become the House of the Territory.
I walked in the footsteps of the past, connecting beauty to faith, faith to art, and moving minds from before to a form of modernity that never alters or destroys. The ruins are marks, vestiges, and imprints, they also tell the foundations and truth, were beacons, cardinal points, directing our axes, our choices, our volumes.
Building after ruins is the past and modernity embracing each other, making the promise never to betray each other. One becomes the other and no one is erased. It is an interweaving of an older time in a new time that does not undo, which does not recompose, but which links, attaches, and grabs, two unknown and not foreign parts, one of which becomes the extension of the other. in a sort of transfiguration.
I have always built this way on my Corsican island, like an archaeologist who brings together what was and what is and what will happen; I do not remove, I hang, bind, affix, slide, resting on the initial ground, on the original work: the copper reveals the stone, the monument and it sacralizes the ruiniform and poetic state.
Ruin is like an x-ray image of a polished structure undone by time.
Convent Saint François renovation and extension by Amelia Tavella Architectes. Photography by Thibaut Dini.
She suddenly finds herself magnified, because held by a reversible copper frame, itself doomed to transform, skate, become a second skin, and have a story.
I liked the idea of a possible return to ruin, that the copper could be undone - this possibility is a courtesy, a respect, to the past, to Corsican heritage.
I built the Maison du Territoire by aligning myself with the original massing. By mimicry, I reproduced the silhouette of the pre-existing building.
Like the mountain scene, I retraced the blueprint, concerned with a symmetry of Beauty, nothing should strike the eye. I am haunted by the obvious. Each work is a work of love. Love of the place, of the building, of its mutation as one could say of a species that transforms itself from what it has been.
Convent Saint François renovation and extension by Amelia Tavella Architectes. Photography by Thibaut Dini.
The copper allowed a gesture of softness, it is feminine like stone. Unlike granite, however, it approaches its grandeur, by its preciousness and its propensity to capture the light, to reflect it, sending it back to the sky like the prayers of the monks and the faithful who address themselves to the Most High.
Its "moucharabiehs" direct the light inward, the light is captured and diffused as if it were passing through the stained glass window of a church. A noble and dazzling material in the first sense of the term, copper transforms the place into an experience. The sun falls there and carries away.
