A retreat center on a Cycladic Island characterized firstly by an exemplary relationship with nature, which pushed the architects to produce semi-underground buildings to preserve the surrounding landscape, which offered the possibility of using the rock extracted to construct. Of a new genre, the program took the design team towards specific strong forms. Thus, the practice room takes an enveloping circular shape, between interior and exterior, and is disconnected from the rest of the world by a long staircase. The restaurant room is characterized by a language of masses reminiscent of the typology of underground quarries, to create a soothing and warm place of pure anchoring. The chapel takes the shape of an intimate oval, mysteriously reachable by a long corridor in a square volume suggesting nothing of the space to come. It offers a place of universal mediation through the creation of an altar to natural elements: light, water, fire, and air.
