Salesian Monastery
This project was made as a master diploma work. The place was chosen in the historical center of Salesians pilgrimage, which become too small to use today. The new monastery was designed for several types of customers: monks, pilgrims, local parishioners, children and people, who need spiritual renewal. After research of Salesian life philosophy, an environment characteristic was proposed reconstruction of the existing temple and creating some new buildings: children center, monastery, temple, rehabilitation center. We also created walking ways over artificial lakes, which are leading to the organized ceremonial water source.
We came up with the idea after long researching time of Salesian life and upbringing philosophy. The main idea of our project was to express spiritual principles in architectural things, which would have special impact on people inside. The combination of these components you can see on diagrams. Master plane structure was based on environment features and Fibonacci spiral, the center of which is the highest point of area and include the main building – Salesian Church. The slope of relief gave us a possibility to reflect the hierarchy of monastery structure. The East part of Monastery is surrounded by wall-gallery, as in traditional way, and also serve as main connecting artery. The character of Salesian Church is based on combination of traditional Ukrainian Marmaros church (which is typical for this area) and signs of Salesian`s philosophy. The colors and materials was borrowed from Italian traditional architecture (where Salesian was founded), also we used terraced vineyards, which highlight the landscape. In general, we tried to create minimalistic, spiritual space with lots of natural light, which make you feel blissfully.
At first we made some sketching of master plan, divided the area on functional zones and led the main communication arteries. After that, we designed plans of every functional part in ArchiCAD and made a models in SketchUp. We used 3Ds Max + Corona plugin as render engine and Photoshop for post-production.
We are happy with the result of this big work, especially ideas and theirs reflection in architecture brought us more new knowledge and experience. Our diploma work got positive feedback from jury, they were surprised of deep idea level & information content.
