Holistic retreat centre
A few kilometres from the Sicilian coast facing the Eolian islands, the project rises within the Madonie Natural Park — between earth and rock, surrounded by olive trees, ficus, ash, and the dense scent of macchia mediterranea.
It begins from an existing ruin, a stripped 1970s house. Rather than being rebuilt, the structure was cut and hollowed — a gesture echoing Gordon Matta-Clark’s radical incisions, allowing light and air to carve through the existing mass and turn the ruin into a monolithic shell merging with the landscape.
The new mass is composed of lime and hemp in their pure state, lightly tinted with local earth — thick, dense, nothing else. The building is radically monomaterial, a single body of matter. The material also keeps the building in thermal balance with its climate. Its walls, ceilings, and floors stand raw, bearing the visible traces of the hands that shaped them: spatulas, trowels, fingers sweeping across the wet matrix. Uneven layers, ridges, overlaps — every surface is a record of human force, of labour and material concourse.
I was directly part of the physical act of shaping, mixing, and layering — a process that turned construction into design, a shared gesture between hands, matter, and thought. I try to understand material not as something to be controlled, but as something to be listened to — shaped through its own resistance.
The physical effort involved in mixing, applying, and sculpting becomes part of the work itself, imbuing the space with a memory of making — a process closer to Wolfgang Laib’s patient accumulations than to conventional construction.
Metal details and light curtains enhance the fluid, holistic atmosphere. The fireplace in the space for practice acts as a gravitational centre — a primitive element anchoring the project to its atavic origin. Every room is made of the same material, regardless of function — bedroom, space for practice or toilet. Two identical kitchens stand on two different levels, one inside and one outside, both synthesised into a raw slab. As layers of matter accumulate, the original frame reappears and becomes part of the experience.
Structure and surface coexist without hierarchy. The result is raw, direct, hedonistic, kind of punk too. Nothing is aligned, nothing is symmetrical — everything flows in a controlled disorder, where precision and imperfection depend on each other.
Perception here is not only visual but spatial, tactile, and atmospheric. The body moves through changing densities of material and light; space is not represented but lived.
This project stands as another declination of what I call raw wholeness: an architecture that rejects digital abstraction and flattened technology, embracing instead the physical act of building as a form of thought.
