Spiritual Architecture

The workshop will provide an opportunity for practical synthesis through which to test all the notions made available through the other educational modules, ensuring strategic responses to a real architectural project. Conducted in collaboration with Franchi Umberto Marmi, the workshop will focus on the adaptive reuse of the Buco della Luna Quarry, one of the most evocative and iconic sites in the Carrara area. Located in the heart of the Apuan Alps, the quarry appears as an immense amphitheater of sculpted marble, where sharp cuts, geometric voids, and pristine white walls define a landscape of rare intensity, shaped by the centuries-long dialogue between human intervention and nature. The large circular opening toward the sky, from which the site takes its name, transforms the space into a chamber of light—a suspended place in which matter seems to breathe and welcome.

Long regarded by artists and designers as a privileged context for its expressive power, Buco della Luna invites meditation, suspension, and introspection. Here, participants will be asked to envision an architecture dedicated to contemporary spirituality: a place for contemplation, encounter, and silence, rooted in the monumental scale of the quarry yet capable of establishing a delicate dialogue with its primordial character. The project, interreligious in nature and open to all forms of inner exploration, will be required to welcome visitors into an experience of elevation, turning stone into a poetic vehicle of light, proportion, and transcendence. In an environment where scale surpasses the human and time seems solidified within matter, the workshop will offer designers the opportunity to reflect on architecture’s capacity to translate emotion, memory, and spirituality into built form.