Our project aim is to recover the original image of this chapel and the walls that still endure and make it as a part and the centre of the complex. Our proposal avoids leaving the chapel as a decontextualized remnant of history perceived as a small temple laying in an English garden.

The program needs of including a complex of facilities to be used by the Community and the Parish, restore the nature of the chapel making it the centre of an articulated complex.

Our proposal wants to make the new situation compatible with the chapel, planning a special body composed of courtyards, warehouses, volumes and enclosures, where for its significance and formal configuration, the chapel is the focus. It’s not viable to recollect the concrete materiality of the lost hospital, so we try to recover the topological and typological characteristics of the pre-existent building, the monument, to justify its principal role.

The conservation of the formality and materiality of the monument constitutes the objective of all restoration charters. Besides, as considered in lots of publications and articles, the materiality given by earth and timber construction corresponds to a wise and natural understanding of sustainability principles.

In 1939, an earthquake destroys most of the hospital and the main front. It’s suitable for our aim to reconstruct this façade thanks to earlier photos taken before 1939 and leave the trace of monument plan on the actual flooring. Not to produce a fabrication of history (due to its reconstruction and not its fancy creation) we report that is a contemporary product writing its date of construction, destruction and reconstruction on the façade, together with other methods of recognition of its historical timeline.

Based on its function, each courtyard acquires a special character. There are the Entrance Compás, the Deads Courtyard (in cornu Epistulae), the Parish Courtyard (in cornu Evangelii) and the Courtyard of the Community, where an open-air church raises in the centre. Reverse oriented in comparison to the liturgical habit of construction of the temples, as in Ronchamp Chapel, this church is configured with a concrete wall on the East side that represent the focus and the symbolic function of this space.

Complimenting these courtyards, other open spaces compose the body of the new hospital, directly connected with the monumental complex. Vegetation intervenes in the general landscape to recreate other lost courtyards and volumes.