Conversion of former monastery gardens - Sora

The setting, at Sora in the Latian Apennines, was partly spoilt by twentieth-century excrescences. The recent operation has sought to bring back environmental quality to this erstwhile Friars Minor monastery gardens, perched on the slopes of San Casto & Cassio Hill which towers above the old town centre. The architectural idea is to exploit the previous rock cutting blasted to make room for some nondescript buildings that have since been demolished. Studio MCM (Renato Morganti, partnered by Mario Morganti and Gianfranco Cautilli) contrive to marry architecture with landscaping, basing their strategy on a medley of different functions connected with this urban upgrade project. Architectural form and materials relate to the hillscape with powerful elegance around a leitmotif of rock, through which we rise in flights of steps and terrace levels up the rugged hillside. This is urban architecture condensed, as it were, by rock – rock cut in slabs of varying dimension and consistency. Sections of wall, free-standing geometrical shapes, line and break up the maze-like progress of the incline, hinting at convergence between architecture and itinerary. Like a modern functional variant on past constructional wisdom with its terraces and pathways hemmed between retaining walls above and below. As well as stone, sheets of Cor-ten steel have been used to mark differing functions symbolically and materially. Solid parapets, cladding on a projection, plated sections hiding access to otherwise obvious utility units. One building stands close to a rockface but separated by a cavity: face to face, building to rock, the full-height glazing giving a close-up from indoors. The interior is all separate shapes and volumes bounded on one side by stretches of wall to form a variegated outline. This space functions as a meeting point for events or study groups; sheltered, appointed, a place for creativity. Once again the architectural combination of technical and expressive features adds specific value and quality to the setting: a steel-framed glass curtainwall juxtaposed to a rockface across a cavity; a unit for sanitary facilities providing a note of colour with its Cor-ten steel lining, which is in turn picked up by an overhang from the masonry, again adorned with Cor-ten. A gallery floor of steel forms a more secluded study area or small meeting room. Structural elements, such as the gallery supports, cluster into a statement about technology and communications.