In the Marmilla hills of Sardinia in Italy, at Bannari on the edge of Villa Verde, Carlo Atzeni, Silvia Mocci, Maurizio Manias and Franceschino Serra arrange a parish complex around one hollow basalt wall running east to west, recently captured by Studio Vetroblu.
A single hollow wall of basalt runs east to west across the site at Bannari, on the edge of Villa Verde, and everything else is arranged by it. The wall absorbs the level change of the plot and splits the ground in two. North of it sit the liturgical hall and its annexes. South of it, a new public space opens onto the village's main road and turns to face the historic landscape of the Marmilla.
The commission began in 2009, after the church built here in the 1960s was demolished. Structural and geotechnical findings had condemned it, and the parish was left without a building. Carlo Atzeni, Silvia Mocci, Maurizio Manias and Franceschino Serra took the loss as grounds to reorganise the whole plot rather than drop a replacement volume onto the old footprint. Part of the earlier fabric at the lower edge of the site survives, refitted for catechism classrooms and parish activities.
Three elements carry the scheme. The wall is hollow, and its thickness holds the baptistery, the confessional and the adoration chapel. A lateral volume follows the slope and gathers the entrance, a patio, the choir and the sacristy. Between the two, the liturgical hall sits under a steep single-pitched roof stretched from one to the other, seating a congregation of around a hundred and fifty.
Basalt cladding over a reinforced concrete core makes the wall structure and spatial instrument at once. It organises circulation, sets the hierarchy between moments of the liturgy, frames the entrance, and mediates between inside and outside, upper ground and lower. Cavities carved through its depth bring daylight into the hall. The bell tower is folded into the wall's profile rather than raised above it, so from the road the complex reads as one long horizontal mass rather than a tower with a church attached.
Arrival works as a sequence of compressions and releases, passing through a permeable screen of corten steel before the hall opens out. Light reaches the interior three ways: through the openings cut in the basalt, through the three-dimensional corten screens of the triangular facades, and from below, through the internal patio.
White lime plaster covers the remaining volumes, corten steel the facades and selected liturgical elements, timber the floors, benches and furnishings. The altar, ambo, baptismal font and stoups are carved as monoliths in white Orosei marble. The crucifix, commissioned from the artist Ermenegildo Atzori, was made by pouring molten lead over a carved larch mould. For a village in the Marmilla, the result is less a monument than a piece of ground reorganised, a wall holding the two halves of parish life on either side of it.
