Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

In order to preserve the existing body of Chiesa Diruta, the idea was to cover up the site with a new perforated concrete skin. From the outside it stands as a pachydermic being, glimmering in the sun like a stroke of white that hit the landscape. From the inside, as a capsuled void, sculpted from the emptiness of a ruined church. What we wanted to convey is that there is no need for a restrictive core: not a single main room, not a formal auditorium. Instead, we offer each visitor the opportunity to seat and feel the sound of music from anywhere it comes. The latin-cross plan of this Chiesa tells us a story of an apse with four different heads, like four sitting areas each one related but still independent. In its center there's the main stage with its oculus, untouched. All the rest develops aside: the old sacristy as an exhibition space and the lateral chapel as a private concert room; the slatted staircase heading up to the city’s terrace in the sky, and the freight-lift taking staff and artists to the service-floors underground. Everything moved quietly around the same nuclear idea, that was to maximize the inner void of the nave’s space. This way we could easily free the lateral vaults for the restrooms, to the north, as well as for the gift shop and the bar, that stand above them. With a lift and a staircase, inside the old tower, there’s still room for a secondary terrace and a plain observatory. Where there was a baptismal font is now a tree and the petals above our heads reinforce the idea of lightness and transcendence, while conducing the sound of the ongoing concert to the lower areas of the audience. All in all, it’s like a hierophany of big stones and smaller trees that are no longer adored as stones or trees but as something entirely different, and entirely new, that is the Sacred space of Grottole.