Foster + Partners will build their chapel in a forest area at one end of the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore. Located between two mature trees with a view of a lagoon, the chapel comprises of three symbolic crosses and a timber deck, which will be “draped” over with a tent-like, wooden latticework structure.
Curated by Francesco Dal Co, the concept takes the form of 11 temporary chapels, each designed by a different architect. Foster + Partners, in partnership with Tecno, has released details of their design concept for one of the 11 temporary chapels of the first ever Vatican City pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale.

The chapel began as three symbolic crosses and a timber deck, draped with a tent-like membrane. Throughout the design process, the scheme evolved into a tensegrity structure of cables and masts, clad with wooden latticework. The architects’ vision was for a diffuse, shaded place of quiet contemplation, framing views of the adjacent lagoon.

Our project started with the selection of the site. On a visit to San Giorgio Maggiore, close to Palladio’s magnificent church and the Teatro Verde, we found a green space with two mature trees beautifully framing the view of the lagoon. It was like a small oasis in the big garden, perfect for contemplation. Our aim is to create a small sanctuary space diffused with dappled shade and removed from the normality of passers-by, focussed instead on the water and sky beyond.
Norman Foster, Founder and Executive Chairman
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Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.

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Published on: March 29, 2018
Cite: "Foster + Partners released details of chapel design for Vatican City's 2018 Venice Biennale pavilion " METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/foster-partners-released-details-chapel-design-vatican-citys-2018-venice-biennale-pavilion> ISSN 1139-6415
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