Already on the approach to the church through the park landscape, the main motif of the project begins to emerge — the pilgrimage path. As in many religions, here too the path is the primary motivator and driving force. By walking this path—winding and unpredictable—each person finds what shapes us. In many religions and teachings, the path is a metaphor for experience, which enriches us as we follow it. At the end of such an experience comes revelation and spiritual elevation.
The goal was not to create a single enclosed space within the natural surroundings that would act as a shelter or a final point isolating the visitor from the environment. The structure is maximally open to nature and to people: at every point along the path we observe others around us moving together with us, and we experience nature from different perspectives and scales.
The concept is based on exploring the church ruins and their surroundings to identify potential points of attraction or anchor points onto which new functions are layered. This method of reconstruction follows the principle of adaptive reuse. The primary anchoring elements turned out to be nature itself and the surrounding views. In this way, the concept enhances the significance of the landscape, and architecture and context work in tandem, continuing one another—making the project feel as if it has been “turned inside out.”
Secondly, the church ruins themselves became the foundation for the creation of a new structure. The composition of the tower volumes echoes the outlines of certain ruin walls, extending them in a new form, as if the new structures had always been there. The load-bearing structures of the towers are made of metal frameworks clad in perforated panels whose transparency and lightness allow the tower volumes to visually dissolve into the landscape and into the ruins themselves. The bases of the towers—massive walls—serve as shelters from bad weather for hikers or as meditative spaces for solitude — Sanctum.
The idea of nature as an authentic, truthful manifestation of things made it possible to design volumes of an organic character, naturally existing in space and logically entwining the church ruins in symbiosis. In a metaphorical sense, the entire complex resembles a naked organism beneath the removed casing of ancient architecture—an ancient artifact that has existed alongside the church from the moment of its construction to the present day.
The boundary between the natural and the built is expanded and blurred by the landscape design, which weaves between the ruins and the towers, allowing visitors to pass through the church and continue their journey, descending back into nature. The contours of the landscape are as soft as the new structure, creating resting areas in front of the church portal. Through these zones, a non-verbal path leads from the park toward the towers, through an “interior” space where the path of ascent begins—rising above the earthly, toward nature, toward space.
