Santa-Lucia di Tallano, Corsica, France

“Like the mountain scene, I retraced the blueprint, concerned with a symmetry of Beauty, nothing should strike the eye,” states Amelia Tavella.

“I am haunted by the obvious. Each work is a work of love. Love of the place, of the building, of its mutation as one could say of a species which transforms itself from what it has been.”

With its back to the cemetery, Amelia Tavvella’s newly restored Convent Saint-Francois of Sainte-Lucie de Tallano for Collectivité de Corse overlooks the Corsican village it watches over. 

Built in 1480 and housed at a height, on its promontory, the convent was a defensive castle before being a place of prayer, of retreat, chosen by monks aware of the absolute beauty of the site. 

Listed as a historical monument, the building was partially in ruins and laid dormant for decades. 

Amelia Tavella had to rebuild, restore, and add a new addition without separating the monument from the vestiges of its past.

The convent has a front and a backstage. 

An olive grove is like a collar at its feet; a happy garden of heavenly food. 

In front, the spectacle of the Corsican mountains, a dizzying merry-go-round of passes and ridges that seem to move in the direction of the clouds and change their dress with the seasons. 

Here pulses the heart of Alta Roca. 

The beauty there is religious and supernatural.

Nature has grown inside the building, Siamese nature slipped between the stones and then transformed into plant armor that protects against erosion and collapse. 

A fig tree is included in the facade. 

The wood, the roots that have become structural have replaced the lime which will not have stood the test of time. 

An essential component of the historic monument, Tavella has honored this nature that had long protected the dormant edifice before its resurrection.

“I chose to keep the ruins and replace the torn part, the phantom part, in copper work which will become the House of the Territory,” states the architect.

“I walked in the footsteps of the past, connecting beauty to faith, faith to art, moving minds from before to a form of modernity that never alters or destroys.”

“The ruins are marks, vestiges, imprints, they also tell the foundations and a truth, they were beacons, cardinal points, directing our axes, our choices, our volumes.”

Building after ruins is the past and modernity embracing each other, making the promise never to betray each other. 

One becomes the other and no one is erased. It is an interweaving of an older time in a new time that does not undo, which does not recompose, but which links, attaches, and grabs, two unknown and not foreign parts, one of which becomes the extension of the other, in a sort of transfiguration.

The new and the old are extensions of each other.

“I have always built this way on my Corsican island, like an archaeologist who brings together what was and what is and what will happen; I do not remove, I hang, bind, affix, slide, resting on the initial ground, on the original work: the copper reveals the stone, the monument and it sacralizes the ruiniform and poetic state,” continues the architect.

“Ruin is like an x-ray image of a polished structure undone by time.” 

“It suddenly finds itself magnified because held by a reversible copper frame, itself doomed to transform, skate, become second skin and have a story.”

“I liked the idea of a possible return to ruin, that the copper could be undone—this possibility is a courtesy, a respect, to the past, to Corsican heritage,” she continues.

“I built the Maison du Territoire by aligning myself with the original massing. By mimicry, I reproduced the silhouette of the pre-existing building.”

The copper allowed a gesture of softness, it is feminine like stone. 

Unlike granite, however, it approaches its grandeur, by its preciousness and its propensity to capture the light, to reflect it, sending it back to the sky like the prayers of the monks and the faithful who address themselves to the Highest. 

The moucharabiehs direct the light inward, the light captured and diffused as if it were passing through the stained-glass window of a church. 

A noble and dazzling material in the first sense of the term, copper transforms the place into an experience. 

The sun falls there and carries away.

Project: Rehabilitation and Extension of the Convent Saint-François
Architects: Amelia Tavella Architectes
Lead Architect: Amelia Tavella
Client: Collectivité de Corse