The site is listed by the World Heritage and has an important ritualistic vocation; it is located on top of a high peak, overlooking the city. For this the implementation of a contemporary building which is surrounded by edifications from the 18th century has to, even more than in other cases, respect the existing topography that is provoking the baroque notion of “search for the heavens”– and to pay reverence to the symbolism of its surroundings. The museum was built to improve the understanding of the place where it is located. Despite being contemporary, the architecture of the museum harmonizes through the project’s characteristics with the language that has been present in that site for centuries: neutral implantation, never competing volumetrically with the main architectural complex; the ‘rhythm’ of the building, with its openings, proportions, alignments and hypsometries in similar scale to the rest of the complex; the immense foundation built in stone, which is very unusual for the times when the sanctuary was built, by using local stones of the region, so they do not feel ‘foreign’ to the setting; the lighter, more fluid upper portion and the walls whitewashed and painted with mineral paint – the same used in the renovation of the Christ’s Steps chapels and the main church itself; the long and smooth curvature of the building, which spreads itself on the slope, in a concave shape that echoes the oval shape of the still-in-use pilgrimage route right under it, as if they both fit each other.

PERFORMANCE