LIGHTHOUSE SEA HOTEL

Report: LSH_ LANDSCAPE HOTEL SIRACUSA
1. INTRO The realization of a complex for tourist reception, inside of a landscaped portion of remarkable beauty like Capo Murro di Porco, subject of the competition, needs a consideration and a deepened surveying both on the place and on the nature of the dialectic relations that need to be established among the parts. The project of a landscape hotel does not have to disturb or contaminate that space among sky, earth and sea, its presence does not disturb but it adorns. There is a dynamic relation between natural landscape and preexisting architecture that cannot be undervalued, it is sufficient to think to the dynamic processes of geological sedimentation that submit the landscape itself, apparently immutable, to a slow but continue transformation.

2. It was very important to understand the qualities of the place and in which way these could be used as a project matter. Going back to the bare contact with the stone like a basic element from which to observe the tangible elements of nature. From a landscape point of view the interpretation of the place and its orographical features has urged the reflections on the dynamic nature of the site: there is never the same vision since the eye perceives the context in kinetic mode changing its dimension and meaning. The rock in that place is characterized by deducted geometries from the geological actions that defined the shape. The inspiration behind the project has been the will to minimize the impact with the orography of the cliff, the project models like shadings the unique features of the site. We think that the project must have an orographical connotation through elements linked for shape to the cliff.

3. The main idea is to manage flexible shapes inside a changing landscape like the rocky one, shapes that lie down to the ground according to the variable geometries of the surface. We prefer to work with objects that can be assimilated, for shape, color and material, to the family of sedimentary rocks and that we will call “stones”. In order to make it possible we consider the new settlement as the last orographical layer of the rock so that the geometric nature of the enormous monoliths on the site defined the matrix of the project thought as a land art operation, with the intrinsic will to disappear but in the same moment to emerge under another shape.

4. The desire is to give the possibility to the buildings to look like, for shape and position, to the rocky elements of the site, therefore we thought to the architecture like a hollow rock laid on the ground in order to give shelter to who wishes to discover the true essence of the place being part of it. The building object is perceived like an artificial fragment of the topography, the structure is compact, multifaceted and sharp like a mineral concretion.

5. What motivated the idea from a planimetric point of view was to find a structural and infrastructural organization that gave us the possibility to establish dynamic events: the distance to the discovery of the peculiarities of the place and the perception of the three existing “systems“: the sea, the sky and the earth.

6. The planimetric disposition of the “stones”, in which we find the accommodation units of the landscape hotel, came from the irregular geometry due to the existing rock fracture, through a geological process, that characterizes the “fields”. All the complex of the accommodation units has a big area of infrastructural passage, from the distributive point of view a boulevard, considered like a condenser of actions that characterize the space.

7. The project has another peculiarity that confronts with the big staircase of the sea that is the walk in footbridge, it clambers along the trace of the cliff marking the border. The walk in quota has been thought like an instrument to experience the place, the perception of the sea, in a dynamic way. The element of the footbridge traces the physical limit of the cliff not anymore like an insuperable border but as a permeable promenade through which it is possible to perceive its dimension.