Italian studio Stefano Boeri Architetti has unveiled its design for the Ambrosian Monastery in Milan, which will feature a sleek roof that shelters cloisters and lifts into a sail-like form over the church altar.
Commissioned by the Archdiocese of Milan, the swooping design aims to provide a space for care, spiritual research and interfaith conversations.
Located in the Milano Innovation District (MIND), the site of the Milan Expo 2015, Stefano Boeri Architetti based its design for the Ambrosian Monastery on a traditional Christian cloister.
Situated on the corner of two streets, a slim roof will form a sheltered walkway that wraps around a central garden space, designed to draw people in from the surrounding area.
The roof will continue around the site into a sweeping, sail-like shape over the church, rising to the highest point at the altar.
Designed to accommodate up to 350 worshippers, the church’s walls will be wrapped in translucent panels.
Elsewhere in the monastery will be a community space, library, study rooms, an open-air amphitheatre and five residences.
A green accessible roof will be populated with sculptures sourced from the storage collections of the Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo di Milano, the institution dedicated to the preservation of Milan’s cathedral.
“We intended to shape the new Ambrosian Monastery with a unified and open architecture, whose spatiality would represent the embrace of the new church,” said Stefano Boeri Architetti founder Stefano Boeri.
“A contemporary monastery, designed to meet the needs of a pluralist society and to promote social cohesion, interreligious dialogue, and the production of knowledge.”
Boeri’s eponymous interiors studio recently completed a semi-circular piazza outside the Colosseum amphitheatre in Rome, adding seating slabs where the bases of columns once stood.
Other monasteries that have featured on Dezeen include MVRDV’s plans to transform the Plum Village Buddhist Monastery in France, and an angular concrete extension to a monastery in Porto by Álvaro Siza.
The images are by Stefano Boeri Architetti.
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