The plan for the Orthodox religious centre and
utility buildings is situated on
the northern tip of Otranto’s harbour and completes a piece of the town
grown up untidily in the last thirty years.
The layout is characterized by a clear
planimetrical legibility, given by solid and void spaces alternation. It
follows its own inner order in contrast with the existing buildings.
Ideally, Its shape looks like the coastline
and, with its position, the plan act as water-front unifying the view of the
town from the sea with its horizontal trend.
The main access to the area is from South, where a wide square holds who
comes from town and continues to the beach with a sloping floor, as stalls
facing the sea.
The fronts as well express the will to distinguish the project from the
existing buildings: all new buildings are enclosed by a four meters high and
wide, almost completely blind, wall.
The only two wall’s discontinuances are rotations built up to attend who
walks down the street to the entries: one for the cultural area and the other
one for the northern square.
The wall doesn’t merely part new buildings from
existing ones, but links the buildings that holds.
Behind the wall all the plan’s functions
develop themselves: the museum with the archaeological pavilion and the
temporary/contemporary one, the library, the kindergarten, a multipurpose room
and the priest’s house with two guest houses.
The water front is characterized by the
predominance of horizontal line too.
The church is the only exception to this design
plan, it is located right in the sea and it is perfectly oriented to East,
joined to the rest of the project,
like a ship docked at a pier.