N Swarnavalli

AR3029

Father Couturier asked Corbusier to design “a silent dwelling for one hundred bodies and one hundred hearts,” when the principle of the Dominicans is ‘seeking god with one heart and one mind’. Therefore, while the individual cells of the monks were graciously designed, the community was forgotten. It also fell short of serving the larger community of people that the Dominicans serve because of its location away from the town.
The intervention, thus, attempts to bring people to the monastery through programmatic changes and revive the almost abandoned monastery as it is today. It goes beyond what traditional monastery typologies were and questions what a Dominican monastery today would be.