DIGS is the premiere luxury real estate lifestyle magazine serving the most affluent neighborhoods in the South Bay and Westside of Los Angeles, California.
Issue link: https://www.southbaydiggs.com/i/1371637
5.14.2021 | DIGS.NET 33 A R C H I T E C T U R E + D E S I G N verlooking the hypnotic depths of the Adriatic, the remnants of an ancient time speak to an ancient place. This is Lopud 1483, a 15th-century Franciscan monas- tery complex, with its church, Our Lady of the Cave, so named for the fact that the friary was built over a sea cave that was later trans- formed into an underground passage connecting it with the open ocean. Below, the sea is all one hears. Listen closer, though, and this piece of history also tells of the more fraught end of the 16th century, when the Republic of Dubrovnik, under constant attacks from the sea during the Ottoman-Venetian wars, built fortifications along its coastline to provide safe harbour to local populations. The fortress now here was among those constructions, making this complex one of both love and war. Today it's mostly love, courtesy of a highly sensitive restoration by Studio Arhitektri, an architectural practice in Zagreb, Croatia co-founded by Aleksandar Markovic and Rujana Bergam Markovic, who served as lead architect on the project—a modern spiritual retreat and one-of-a- kind public venue. Knowing the history of this place like the back of their hand allowed the architects to make the building 21st-century functional while sanctioning its original purpose as an old-world monastery and fortress. A project with the historical importance of this magnitude was the first of its kind for the practice, and Rujana admits it being "both a gift and a burden." A gift in the sense that it "makes you want to make great things," she says, but at the same time "makes you feel humbled." In keeping with Arhitektri's ethos to create unobtrusive and human-centered interventions, their charge was largely one of unification; finding a language that could communicate between the future and the past. "In the beginning, the task seemed poetic and beautiful with so many layers to work with and learn from, but soon we realized it was intertwined with a plethora of technical issues," says Rujana. The aim "was to design and build the new parts as contemporary and not to invent or create replicas or to try to make something look old with the use of new materials." To do so would have been insincere. The approach, rather, was to be respectful of a building that had stood for so long while applying the knowledge, new techniques, technologies and materials of the current era. The result is that innovation is noticed but does not detract. Exhibition rooms are equipped with climate control, a conference room has state-of-the- art technologies, five suites offer heating and cooling, a ground floor was reconstructed and preserved as needed. Rujana recalls the challenge of finding solutions to implement the latest technical systems into a centuries-old building without being visible or invasive akin to "solving the most intriguing labyrinth." Yet one does not see this sleuthing. "I think the best compliment we received was that the new features feel like they have been here forever!" she says. O