Rehabilitation and extension of the convent Saint-François | Amelia Tavella Architects

Nature of the project

Rehabilitation and extension of the Convent Saint-François, in Sainte-Lucie de Tallano, Corsica in cultural center.This partially ruined building from 1480, listed as a historical monument, had been abandoned for a very long time.
 

Project Owner                                                                      Collectivité de Corse

Architect                                                                               Amelia Tavella Architects    

Surface area                                                                         1 000 m2       

City                                                                                        Santa-Luci di Tallano, Corsica

 
Amelia Tavella has just completed the rehabilitation and extension of the Convent Saint-François, in Santa-Lucia di Tallano, Corsica. This partially ruined building from 1480, listed as a historical monument, had been abandoned for a very long time.

“I believe in higher and invisible forces. The Convent of Saint Francis of Saint Lucia in Tallano, built in 1480, is part of this belief. Housed high up, on its promontory, it was a defensive castle before being a place of prayer, of retreat, chosen by monks aware of the absolute beauty of the site. Faith rallies to the sublime.

With his back to the cemetery, he overlooks the village he is watching. It has a front and a back stage. An olive grove is like a collar at its feet, a happy garden of heavenly food. In front of him, the spectacle of the Corsican mountains, a dizzying merry-go-round of passes and ridges that seem to move in the direction of the clouds and change their dress with the seasons. Here pulses the heart of Alta Roca. The beauty there is religious, supernatural.

Nature has grown inside the building, Siamese nature slipped between the stones and then transformed into plant armor that protects against erosion and collapse. A fig tree is included in the facade. The horn, the wood, the roots become structural replaced the lime which will not have withstood the test of time. An essential component of the historic monument, we have honored this nature which will have long protected the dormant building before its resurrection.
We have chosen to keep the ruins and replace the torn part, the phantom part, in copper work which will become the House of the Territory.
 
I walked in the footsteps of the past, connecting beauty to faith, faith to art, moving minds from before to a form of modernity that never alters or destroys. The ruins are marks, vestiges, imprints, they also tell the foundations and a truth, they were beacons, cardinal points, directing our axes, our choices, our volumes.
 
Building after ruins is the past and modernity embracing each other, making the promise never to betray each other. One becomes the other and no one is erased. It is an interweaving of an older time in a new time which does not undo, which does not recompose, but which links, attaches, grabs, two unknown and not foreign parts, one of which becomes the extension of the other. in a sort of transfiguration. I have always built this way on my Corsican island, like an archaeologist who brings together what was and what is and what will happen; I do not remove, I hang, bind, affix, slide, resting on the initial ground, on the original work: the copper reveals the stone, the monument and it sacralizes the ruiniform and poetic state.
 
The ruin is like the radiographic image of a structure polished and undone by time and suddenly magnified because raised and held by a reversible frame, a light frame, itself doomed to transform, to skate, to become a second skin and to possess a story.
 
I liked the idea of ​​a possible return to ruin, that the copper could be undone - this possibility is a courtesy, a respect, to the past, to Corsican heritage
I built the Maison du Territoire by aligning myself with the original massing. By mimicry, I reproduced the silhouette of the pre-existing building.
 
Like the mountain scene, I retraced the blueprint, concerned with a symmetry of Beauty, nothing should strike the eye. I am haunted by the obvious. Each work is a work of love. Love of the place, of the building, of its mutation as one could say of a species which transforms itself from what it has been.
 
The copper allowed a gesture of softness, it is feminine like stone. Unlike granite, however, it approaches its grandeur, by its preciousness and its propensity to capture the light, to reflect it, sending it back to the sky like the prayers of the monks and the faithful who address themselves to the Most High.
Its moucharabiés direct the light inwards, light captured and diffused as if it were passing through the stained glass window of a church. A noble and dazzling material in the first sense of the term, copper transforms the place into an experience. The sun falls there and carries away.”
Amelia Tavella

Born in Corsica, where she saw in her beautiful landscapes an opening to all horizons, Amelia Tavella was qualified, on the occasion of the Choiseul Ville de Demain Palmarès,
"Rising star of French architecture".
Its architectural signature, attached to the sensuality of noble and natural materials, fulfilled by men of art, is the mark of constant work on the memory of places, particularly in the Mediterranean.
Several talent developers have chosen to honor the particular artistic approach that characterizes the work of Amelia Tavella.
She is thus appointed to the rank of Chevalier in the National Order of Merit, within the 2020 promotion of the Grand Chancellery of the Legion of Honor.
“The Mediterranean is my matrix. I come from there, from this unique place. Child of the maquis and the sands, I learned the complexity of my job as an architect here. Sea, rock, beach, my femininity has embraced the femininity of this sea, exercising with delicacy, rewinding damaged lace, inspiring me with sediments, a soft, original material.
My island taught me about light, color, slope, constantly reminding me that there is no valid creation without ethics and that history is the cradle of the present.
My architecture is inspired by the maquis. I take back its beauty, its color, its texture, its density. Each time I pay tribute to him. I do not separate anything. Nature and my buildings stand on the same line, respond to each other. It’s an echo and then a fusion. I use the materials from my island to bring it back to life on its own. A single word contains and gives impetus to my wish as an architect: ethics
This is how my artistic approach is built, linked to my roots, to the origin.”