The area at the lighthouse in Izola

location: Izola, Slovenia
client: Municipality of Izola
area: 4,5 ha
competition: 2007; 1. nagrada | 1st prize
authors: Ana Kučan, Maruša Zorec, Simona Truden, Miha Slekovec, Meta Petrič, Marko Klemenčič, Maša Cotič in Tadeja Božičnik

The competition brief for the renovation and redesign of the beach area around the Izola lighthouse called for a plan that covered both the coast and the inland park. Our starting point was the experience of looking out to the horizon where the sky meets the sea in the distance, the experience of that almost unbearable horizontality, the view interrupted only by the dark verticals of trees. That contrast between light and dark, open and closed, is characteristic of the Mediterranean where, from the shelter of pine trees, the long view into the light of blueness opens out onto “this unfathomable expansion, merging with the sky on the horizon and disappearing into infinity”. On the minute Slovenian coast, this experienceis hardly possible, which is why we wanted to push it to the extreme. From the experience of the horizon, we derived our compositional principle and applied it not only to the design of landscape, but also to the architectural elements that would be placed within this landscape. On one hand, we proposed horizontal lines that approach the town from the seaside and, on the other hand, dark verticals that pierce the horizon, framing the gaze from the inland park out to the sea. We translated this experience into an image that became a medium of communication.