Author
Raul Gabriel
XII century Rivalta Scrivia cistercian abbey project
General topics
Author
Client
Diocese of Tortona, Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Alessandria
Project
New presbytery, altar, seat, ambo Cistercian abbey from the 12th century. of Rivalta Scrivia (AL)
The abbey of Rivalta Scrivia, in the panorama of Cistercian thought, represents a unicum for a variety of reasons. Its heterogeneity in terms of materials, shapes and spaces is decidedly peculiar and stimulates progressive curiosity and an invitation to discovery in the observer, as soon as the initial impression of an immediate and unitary reading perceived upon entering gradually leaves room for a journey of surprises.
Volume, material and form are components of a complex language from which the reflection underlying the liturgical adaptation project that I conceived for the new presbytery of Rivalta Scrivia, currently practically non-existent, starts. The place is designed not to create distractions for meditation, to which you are invited by a path of progressive immersion through a skilful management of volumes and proportions that can surprise. The Cistercian method presents unsuspected elements of contemporaneity and contamination, renouncing the descriptive and figurative element except for stylized phytomorphic references.
Main concept
All the architecture in the Rivalta Scrivia Abbey is a constant dialogue between the whole and the detail. A dialogue in alternating phases, extremely articulated, managed like a musical composition with its pauses and crescendos, its syncopations and its cues. In this sense the abbey building is a profoundly complex composition. The beats of his music appear regular while they are enlivened by completely original forms and rhythms, sometimes causal, sometimes determined by the juxtaposition of subsequent and not always coherent interventions, however verifying precisely through the latter the surprising stability of the original thought. My task was to think as a Cistercian monk would have thought today, to account for a continuity without which the intervention in the building would be perceived as a foreign body, transforming the environment into a museum container sacrificing the unitary and heterogeneous path of a intuition interpreted by the evolution of history.