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. |