Lighthouse Sea Hotel - the Splint
Imagining a new settlement in a landscape apparently hostile to any addiction is arduous and even dangerous.
The fascination of the Cape rests on the delicate balance between Rocks, Sea, Sky and the built environment: the Lighthouse.
We questioned how to design a new element in this scenery and how to harmoniously integrate the needs of a modern hotel with this fragile surrounding.
The answer we give relies in the Lighthouse itself.
As the only standing out man-made form in the area, we approached to the site understanding and truly grasp the role of the Lighthouse in its symbolic and deepest meaning.
It is a form of respect and veneration.
The implications that the Lighthouse has on its surrounding had been explored and then consciously stated in 4 verbs: to orient, to limit, to define, to isolate.
TO ORIENT Lighthouses are monuments of vision: they suggest guidance and orientation. As catalysts of their context, they act as centers of multiple networks and reference point for different dynamics.
Our project has been developed in order to insert and find a place in this system for the new form.
The hotel, both in the composition and the functional aspects, indicate stability and sense of orientation within its formal simplicity.
The long and central distribution spine highlights its horizontal axiality. The ascensional dynamic of the lighthouse is counterbalanced by the settled horizontal stage that interacts within its immediate surroundings and harmoniously coexists with the horizontal infinity of sea and sky.
It monumentally emerges from the context.
TO LIMIT The linear design of the project guarantees the existence of its locus: the protected area of Plemmirio.
It acts as a barrier against the informal built environment that is spreading out from the city of Siracuse.
Architecture assumes the role of defining a stronger identity. Underlining and emphasizing its limits, the space achieves a clear meaning and its general status is recognized by all.
As the lighthouse marks the transition between the known and the unknown world, the walls of the intervention stresses out the difference between what is before the wall, what is after, and what is in-between.
Limiting is an act of being.
TO DEFINE The new settlement of the project truly defines the surroundings, and its order is expressed both outward and inward.
The apparent opposition between nature and manmade architectural forms is solved with the organic integration of the project’s scale with its spread environment of masses and pure elements: a metaphysical approach.
This broad vision leads us to guarantee, at the same time, a rigid and regular sequence of spaces.
The outcome of the project is favored by a rhythmic plan that never decreases to a simple repetition but succeed in enhancing the potentials of each space.
Solidly anchored on compact masses of rocks, the project seems to define a univocal spatial order.
TO ISOLATE The man and the lighthouse: a lonesome and solitary relationship.
The hotel is designed with this image in mind. Each space of the project is still an intrinsically integrated part of a meaningful, all-encompassing order but, at the same time, it can appear as one single metaphysical setting.
The guest of the hotel is intended as a hermit.
The pureness of the spaces, the regular composition, the limited connection to the elements of nature intensify the effect of the surprising, the unexpected, the captivating.
Isolation is an attitude towards the appreciation of the mythical Sicilian soil and its majestic mediterrean atmosphere.
