LIGHTHOUSE SEA HOTEL SYRACUSE - competition entry
Location: Syracuse, Sicily
Year: 2016
Team: Dana Ioana Tudor, Ileana Cristina Balan, Dragos Nastase
The competition focused on making the most of an abandoned lighthouse near Syracuse, Sicily, and its valuable location and proximity to the sea to create dream-like accommodation able to reinvent the ancient lighthouse and reverse its degradation process.
Our entry concentrates on a collection of buildings that rise out of the rough stone landscape, arranged to function like a tightly knit town, forming a complex composition of architectural elements. Having the quiet emptiness of a village, where silence becomes an architectural tool, it evokes the intimacy and social functionalism of the traditional Mediterranean townscapes.
The units are characteristically to the Mediterranean village, simple with small punched openings providing shelter from the harsh rays of the sun. The buildings and urban elements are linked via walkways to rock gardens and simple clear water pools, allowing the inhabitants to move from the inside to the open freely, never mixing the two realms.
Using a restrained collection of forms, the theatrical effect is achieved by the density and intensity of the composition. Different heights and a constant play of scale are used to blur the boundaries between foreground and background, giving a sense of longing, while the space between, outlines an intricate network of pavements and courtyards. The shaded courtyards provides shelter, the pools scattered around the terrain modulate the structure through reflection, light and freshness, while the stones and pigmented concrete echo the colours of the dry earth and mild wind, those of the sea and of the sky.
The scheme of the houses is based around a series of terraced units where the space between forms a network resembling mini-streets. The paths are punctuated by breaks and formal interventions which open up a hierarchy of vistas, framing the lighthouse and the surrounding nature. White stairs lead toward the roof tops, and seam to unite the ground with the sky, bounding them in an "attempt to unite the earth and the heavens" as Imre Makovecz used to say.
Light and silence play key roles, embraced by form, materials, textures and dark shadows that come alive; a love of contrasts, material and immaterial, light and shadow, mass and void. The elements come together forming an organic entity reacting as a body.
