Native studio Medprostor has lined and partially repaired a 900-year-old Romanesque church in Slovenia, inserting an operable roof over the open construction to create an area “between a spoil and a reconstruction.”
Medprostor has carried out a collection of modest interventions alongside the folding roof that purpose to guard the necessary monastic constructing, situated inside the fortified grounds of the historic Chartogia Žiče.
Repairs and modifications had been additionally geared toward enhancing its performance for tourism and occasions.
Based on the studio, the mission was designed to guard the immaterial qualities of the church as an historical and sacred place, along with preserving its bodily stays.
“The development and restoration interventions had been carried out in such a approach as to permit a chronological studying of the 900-year-old sacral area,” Medprostor co-founder Jerneja Fischer Knap instructed Dezeen.
“[The design] absolutely complies with heritage safety necessities for reversibility, with much less invasive and fewer intensive interventions,” he continued.
“The largest intervention was protecting the prevailing constructing with a semi-mobile, collapsible roof,” Knap mentioned.
“When it’s lowered, it permits the harmonious unfolding of occasions within the church whatever the season and climate, whereas when it’s raised, it preserves some of the necessary intangible moments of the spoil: the contact with the open sky.”
Light-weight black metal, blackened wooden and darkish slate tiles make up the half-gable roof system, distinguishing the gesture from the church's unique masonry structure.
Medprostor additionally selected restrained and rectilinear geometries for his interventions, looking for to determine a low-tech aesthetic language that would sit harmoniously in opposition to heritage buildings.
“The roof, together with its particulars and proportions, are associated to the important thing architectural parts of the complete church,” defined Knap. “And but it might additionally act as an phantasm – a specter in concord with the open, ephemeral character of the spoil… [a] area between a spoil and a reconstruction”.
The studio reconstructed a demolished a part of the partitions and flooring of the church, whereas spiral staircases had been positioned within the present vertical shafts to reconnect guests to a viewing platform on the higher stage.
“Two staircases are linked to a brand new vantage level with a slim, barely inclined hall resulting in it, framed by the outer faces of [reconstructed] the north wall,” defined Knap.
“The vantage level gives an important view from above of the northern a part of the monastery complicated and its ruined character.”
Slovenian structure studio Medprostor was based by Knap, Rok Žnidaršič and Samo Mlakar in 2011, with initiatives spanning the private and non-private sectors.
Medprostor's interventions at Žiče Charterhouse have been shortlisted for the European Mies van der Rohe Award 2024, which was beforehand received by Grafton Architects for the colonnaded instructing constructing for Kingston College in London.
The seven finalists for the 2024 Mies van der Rohe Prize had been not too long ago revealed to incorporate the Reggio College by Andrés Jaque, a copper-clad monastery in France and a library from SUMA Arquitectura in Spain.
The photograph is by Miran Kambič.