Art Hotel - Artist’s retreat

Siracusa, Italia

Authors: arch. Dana-Ioana Tudor, arch. Dragos Georgian Nastase, arch. Ileana Cristina Balan / Dragos Nastase, Dana Tudor, Ileana Balan

Authors’ Comment

The competition focused on making the most of an abandoned lighthouse near Syracuse, Sicily. We chose to target the artists community-an environment suitable for the expression and exhibition of artistic creativity.Our intervention forms a collection of buildings that rise out of the rough stone, arranged like a tightly knit town. Having the quiet emptiness of a village, silence becomes an architectural tool and evokes the intimacy and social functionalism of the traditional Mediterranean townscape.
The theatrical effect is achieved by the density and intensity of the composition. The houses are a series of terraced units where the space between forms a network resembling mini-streets. The paths are punctuated by breaks and formal interventions which open up a hierarchy of vistas framing the lighthouse and the surrounding nature. White stairs lead toward the roof tops in an "attempt to unite the earth and the heavens" as Imre Makovecz used to say.
Light and silence play key roles: embraced by form, materials, textures and shadows that come alive; a love of contrasts, material-immaterial, light-shadow, mass-void. The elements come together forming an organic entity reacting as a body.

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