Detail of the project ed. 2020

FLO­RES & PRATS – THE MORN­ING CHAPEL — VAT­I­CAN CHAPEL

Design­er	Ricar­do Flores
Loca­tion	Island of San Gior­gio Mag­giore, Venezia
Design Team	Archi­tects: Flo­res & Prats (Ricar­do Flo­res, Eva Prats). Col­lab­o­ra­tors: Nina Andreat­ta, Inès Mar­tinell, Jorge Casajús.
Year	2018
Pho­to credits	All 10 pho­tos by Adrià Goula.

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

The Vat­i­can Coun­try par­tic­i­pat­ed at the Venice Archi­tec­ture Bien­nale for the first time in 2018. Their pavil­ion was curat­ed by the archi­tect Francesco Dal Co, who invit­ed 10 dif­fer­ent archi­tec­tur­al offices from around the globe to design a chapel inside the for­est of San Gior­gio Mag­giore Island. The Chapel was to be a place of gath­er­ing and ori­en­ta­tion. The for­est of San Gior­gio has a fan struc­ture of walks, start­ing from Pal­la­dio’s clois­ters towards the Lagoon. The Morn­ing Chapel is along one of these long paths, and sits right before this walk­ing line meets the water.

The Morn­ing Chapel is pre­sent­ed as a wall par­al­lel to the path. This wall has a door, offer­ing the option to step aside from the com­mon route and cross it, get­ting into the for­est. The chapel becomes a door to the grander enti­ty to which it belongs: a nat­ur­al dome made out of the adja­cen­cy of tree branch­es. The frag­men­tary con­di­tion of the chapel is thus com­ple­ment­ed by the pine for­est, and bor­rows its nat­ur­al qual­i­ties from the trees in it: the smell, the fresh air, the nois­es and the light. Both ele­ments, built and veg­e­tal, form a nat­ur­al clear­ance that embraces the vis­i­tor, and cre­ate a place to stay. It is a change of rhythm, a change of breath. 

The cho­sen site for the Chapel is at the east­ern part of the island, where the morn­ing starts and the chapel can catch the first sun of the day. This chapel is an ear­ly morn­ing place, where the first sun­light becomes vis­i­ble through a ray of light that tres­pass­es an ocu­lus in its wall. The Morn­ing Chapel, catch­ing the sun­light on its walls, and the island for­est, a con­tin­u­ous canopy in dark­ness, togeth­er estab­lish a qui­et place, an invi­ta­tion to sit alone or in a group. Once there, one is con­front­ed with the same end that the lin­eal walk was lead­ing to. The dif­fer­ence is that The Morn­ing Chapel builds anoth­er per­spec­tive and a meet­ing place: its open con­di­tion wel­comes all kinds of vis­i­tors to this side of Venice.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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