Maria Ave Romani and Paolo Catrambone . + arkxsite
Entry for the Site Landmark competition by ArkxSite in Sagres, Portugal.
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The Landscape Fortress located between the Sagres Promontory and Cape St. Vincent, aims to create a new destination point within this spectacular landscape. The building represent the time of arrival and contemplation, a place to engage with the landscape, in order to offer to each visitor the best experience within the immensity of the place.
To imagine a site-landmark that plays with cliff profile, we think about a building designed in plan by the same folds that form the ground.
So we select the most important elements of this landscape justifying with it the new fortress shape. Each facade host a thematic room where a particular opening directed to each theme allows people to appreciate every single element which is composing this wonderful place.
Everything is already there, we just needs to enrich it with meanings. A wall, intended as a fortress, seems the perfect condition for a shelter and through some precise opening in it we can consciously perceive this place. This wall is structured to guide the visit as a route, equipped with seats and services to visit, as info-point, toilets, some multi-purpose rooms for meetings, exhibitions or projections and even an outdoor space where travelers could rest the night, surrounded by nature.
Entering in this contemporary fortress the visitor has the opportunity to experience the 5 deepest meanings of this place:
1_the artificial action of man that builds the most inaccessible areas of the reef, represented by the town of Sagres;
2_then he could sits and watch the horizontal balance of the endless ocean that is opposed to the cliff verticality;
3_in the next room he could appreciate the poetry of wind, which is conducted through a “tunnel” space in a sound room. Here he will listen the waves sound, mixed with the force of the ocean wind. In this room we can feel the wind presence protected by our walls.
4_after that is the moment to test the rough and rugged materiality composing this cliff, through a descending path that leads up to touch the rocks essence
5_ In the end his attention is captured by the light power of the lighthouse, repetitive and reassuring, which stands on the cliff
This proposal is characterized as a continuos path, because the simple act of walking is the most important act in reading landscape process.
