Detail of the project ed. 2016

chapel-in-the-woods-saint-james-pil­­grim-house / CZI­TA Architects

Design­er  Tamás Czigány
Loca­tion  Pan­non­hal­ma, Hungary
Design Team  

Tamás Czigány, Róbert Papp, András Cseh
Year  2010
Pho­to credits  

Tamás Czigány

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

The Chapel in the Woods was built as the last ele­ment of Saint James Pil­grim House, a build­ing com­plex designed by CZI­TA Archi­tects for shel­ter­ing the vis­i­tors of the Bene­dic­tine Arch­abbey of Pan­non­hal­ma. In the calm woods of Csei­der Val­ley this new place recent­ly came to exis­tence in order to pro­vide acco­mo­da­tion, recre­ation and relax­ation for the vis­it­ing pil­grims, fam­i­lies and groups of youth.
The Pil­grim House itself con­tains sev­er­al inde­pen­dent build­ings posi­tioned care­ful­ly in the land­scape. The din­ing, lec­ture and ser­vice rooms were arranged in the ren­o­vat­ed wing of the pre­vi­ous laun­dry house of the Abbey and in a join­ing new block, while the appart­ments were placed on the south­ern slopes of the site. Three out of the four hous­ing units work as youth hos­tels, one acco­mo­dates appart­ments for fam­i­lies and a pil­grim shel­ter for one.
As the final ele­ment, the Chapel is an in-between space hid­den into the forest­ed area of the site. It man­i­fests the tran­si­tion from built to nat­ur­al, from out­side to inside and from sec­u­lar to sacral — while pro­vid­ing place for with­draw­al, silent obser­va­tion and pri­vate prayer. There is no door, no win­dow, no heat­ing or arti­fi­cial light­ing. The wind blows and the sun shines through it, it is weaved through by light — an in-between space.
The floor area of the build­ing is 20 square meters, its height is 9 meters. It is entire­ly made out of wood. All the ele­ments — the wall and the roof struc­tures, the bench and the altar — are con­struct­ed from hor­i­zon­tal tim­ber beams con­nect­ed by hard­wood pegs, the roof is cov­ered by wood­en shingles.
The con­struc­tion work of the Chapel was a com­mu­nal activ­i­ty com­plet­ed by the hand­work of the con­trac­tor, the archi­tects and their archi­tec­ture stu­dents — those were soul­ful days.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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