Stella Maris is a hypogeal intervention to create a meditative space in the project of a chapel and cloister within a residential complex designed for guests with disabilities and their families in a natural environment of great beauty, there is a thick and deep pine forest overlooking the Adriatic Sea. The land slowly begins to rise abandoning the darkness of the pine forest to then turn into a terrace that reaches the height of the canopy of pines suddenly revealing the sea in all its vastness. A large dune that transforms the clearing of space in the below garden which is articulated the built space. From here, it has been proceeded for excavation and subtraction, while climbing the presence of a vacuum is felt, a sudden suspension, which can not be accessed, but which is strongly present. Around this space the cloister - everything revolves around the sacred space ? where it is only possible to access from the chapel, also barely perceptible from the outside, a crypt in which the natural light enters from a single cut, from the east, the morning light. It has been built in blocks of stone whose surface was machined with a particular milling, which makes disappear the joints, with the effect that seems obtained for excavation by an immense mass of stone.
Courtesy of Toti Semerano

architects: Toti SemeranoLocation: ItalyProject Year: 2021Photographs: Courtesy of Toti SemeranoArea: 47425.0 m2
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