A SANCTUARY OF STONE

On the outskirts of Matera, two disused quarries lie as large cartesian scars in a rocky barren landscape. The project examines drawing, making and material at a large scale to achieve a sensitive proposal to the two quarries, informed through learning processes of masonry to manipulate stone and drawing at standard scales across large canvases. “A Sanctuary of Stone” introduces two main programmatic interventions; botanic research and residential writing; spread across multiple buildings, set within a wider masterplan across the sunken plane of the quarries. The masterplan creates routes and journeys through the already impressive spaces and improves biodiversity through enhancing rewilding within the quarries. An architectural design language is formed through material-centric Marquette models which explore ways to fit and join timber to stone and vice-versa. This language is used freely over the quarries to transform the large site into a spectacle of structures which work in synergy to create a hub of civic activities based on ecology and literature. The projects then centres in on a library, where ecological-based academic research papers can be written or equally romance novellas can be drafted and edited.