The Benedictine Monastery caught my attention in many ways. The first thought that came to mind was how small it looked from the outside. The exterior of the building is white to embrace the style of modern architecture of the time it was being constructed. It is of similarity to the style of The New York Five (architects, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier). From the west facade, the entrance presented itself as a structure with no change in elevation, but it was completely opposite when I walked up closer and was able to see over the edge of the hill. Looking up from a lower elevation, the monastery consist of some unique and similar to La Tourette by Le Corbusier. They both serve the same purpose and belong of two different culture that uses different types of system to build it both structurally and aesthetically.
The interior space of the monastery further breaks away from traditional cathedrals and monastery design by creating a ramp. The ramp also hides the centralized space of worship from plain sight to make people take a journey through the space. The whole interior is bright and white to reinforce the idea of holiness and allow people to feel connected to god. Many traditional ideas has been broken, but the alter is still facing east to allow the light to shine in as sunrise ego create a unique light effect that illuminated the cross to show god’s presence.
My interpretation is that people feel like they are being lied to when they arrived from the west facade when they thought the elevator is simple and what you see is all there is to the building. This represents sinning. Then people enter the building, see the wooden sculpture of Mother Mary holding baby Jesus and progress down the ramp. This represents confession and journey to asking for forgiveness. Then people will progress down into the service space and see a natural light illuminating the holy cross from the east facade. This stage represents forgiveness because light represents purity.
I throughly enjoyed a lot of your photos here. One of the things that I noticed on this visit was its strong resemblance to the Benedictine monastery. Specifically, the private worshipping room where some come to pray silently. This space was incredible and I truly appreciated everything. However, I noticed the strong resemblance between the setup here and in Benedictine. Both rooms had a crack in the middle to let the light shine through causing us to pay attention to one of the saints. This place was incredible well thought of as the roof also had light shine through hitting some saints to draw importance to them. It was incredibly well thought of in terms of utilization of the light.