The divorce between faith and science during the great awakening has partitions still juggled today. This institution, focused on the study of religiously significant archeological finds, works to resolve the severance between these two paths to objective truth, presenting them as two sides to the same coin. In this space, scientists and theologians, nuns and agnostics, work hand in hand to uncover the truth through the study of the past. The building mimics the dual faces of this search with two halves of contrasting postures, the upper with an exploitative and outward reaching gesture and the lower, humble and inward-focused. In this way, they support and complement each other.
The sanctuary rests, embedded within the northernmost cliff side of the Reostone quarry in West-Nashville which has provided the area with limestone for decades. The northern position enables consistent sunlight to the window-centric southern face. Views of the vegetation rich eastern cliff are complemented and facilitated by this orientation. Because the majority of the institution is below the surface of the surrounding landscape, the site in its entirety is still and quiet.
The building is equipped with 10 levels of necessary program. The top two floors house the temporary residents who cycle through monthly, following their assigned artifacts. These sit just above the research library. The entrance into the institution takes place at the welcome and dining level, below which artifacts are loaded in and out of the freight elevator. Between the two halves of the building is the metaphorical scar which isolates a rebar column central to the project. In the lower half is the chapel, support, and lab spaces. The lowest level is a tunnel providing passage to the monastery in which the 30 nuns that run the facility permanently and privately reside. The rebar column unifies all 10 levels
Running through the entire hight of the building is a sculptural lightwell of concrete and rebar, providing diffused light and housing a stair in the library. Constricting as it descends, this unifying feature becomes the metaphorical stitching, pulling together faith and science and mending their severance. The implementation of rebar alludes to the site’s original purpose where rebar bolts were used in the tunneling process to compress shattered rock layers and prevent cave-ins. Now the bolt’s compressive qualities are repurposed in this stitching, joining the top to the bottom level where it terminates in the soil.
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The research library, complete with data storage and offices, offers the accommodations for the necessary analysis of archaeological precedent. The window on the south face controls light and extends out, providing views of the horizon and an abstraction of where the knowledge contained there originated.
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A tunnel connects the sanctuary to the monastery which sits in its entirety below the reservoir water level. At the center is a domed rotunda which reaches out with ascending hallways that join the 30 bedrooms of the nuns. Each concentric ring of dorms sits 4 feet above the one preceding which creates a lightwell in each room. Water cascades down the levels before being pumped back into the reservoir.
Mon 08/21/2023 - Wed 11/08/2023
6611 Robertson Ave // Nashville // TN
36°09’54”N 86°52’33”W
Individual Project
Vestige Sanctuary
Center of Sacred Artifacts
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