In 1984 an avalanche destroyed the Baroque chapel at the entrance to Sogn Benedetg, because a parking lot which had been filled in forced a huge slab of a snow like a ramp up to the chapel. The new site on an old mountain trail above the hamlet is protected from avalanches by the forest above. The wooden chapel, mantled with larch-wood shingles, was inaugurated in 1988. Three years earlier the community had granted us the building permit with the comment "senza perschuasiun," without conviction. But the prelates of the Disentis Monastery and the village pastor Martin Bearth wanted to build something new and contemporary for future generations. A leaf, an eye, a fish, a boat, a wedge to divert avalanches--it pleases me to hear these inter- pretations of the form of this little church, but the actual story of how it came to be is different. The specifications of the competition enabled us to conceive of the chapel as a single space. The idea that its exterior form would be defined by a single interior space fascinated me. This is the notion of a simple vessel. I wanted to find a soft, maternal form for my vessel. Even as a young boy I had had my problems with the authoritarian, indoctri- nating church; so a predominating, geometrical form such as a square, a circle, or a rectangle was out of the question for me. Our engineer Jürg Conzett took my original freehand sketch and defined it geometrically as half of a lemniscate. The Surselva region of Graubünden, where the chapel is located, is full of Baroque chapels wonderfully placed in the landscape-white plasterwork gems from the Counterreformation, standing alone in the meadow. Our Sogn Benedetg also stands alone in the meadow. The wooden pasture fencing, taken down every winter by the farmers before the first snow, directly abuts the chapel. But Sogn Benedetg, unlike the white Baroque chapels of the region, is made of wood. Its structure ages beautifully with the weather; it has become dark and darker on the south side, and silvery on the north. Perhaps the chapel is a little wooden boat after all, built for an uncertain journe by local people born into the heritage of building with wood.