ARCH_500-600 Options Studio: ‘Inhabiting an Axis Mundi: A Vertical Monastery in Florence, Italy’

“Architecture is a vase. My reward for eight years of labor [on La Tourette] is to have seen the highest things grow and develop within that vase. … [The monastery] does not speak of itself. It lives on its interior. It is in the interior that the essential occurs.”

—Le Corbusier

This studio program involved the design of a contemporary monastery in the heart of ancient Florence. Sited in the Piazza del Carmine on the south side of the River Arno, the monastery took the form of a thin, vertical tower, similar to the dozens of medieval towers that remain in Florence, embedded in buildings. Students were challenged to elevate the private monastic programs of monks’ cells, refectory, library, choir, chapel, chapter house, and colloquium off the public ground plane and into the sky, engaging the shifting horizon line of Paul Klee and transforming the traditionally horizontal monastery into a habitable axis mundus—the vertical axis connecting the earth to the heavens.

The project was designed in two phases. “Project 1: Levitating Rooms: Cell/Cloister/Choir/Chapel” explored the relationship in section between the individual monastic cell (related to horizontal light) and the collective monastic chapel (related to zenithal, vertical, light). “Project 2: Vertical Datum: Monastery as Society of Spaces” developed the full monastic program for the vertical monastery in the Florence site, unfolded in section within a delimited volume—bounded physically but unbounded visually—and anchored to the ground and touching the sky.