Sylwia Bartoszewicz and Kasia Pilat
Glacier Ridge Monastery
From the third-year undergraduate studio The Charterhouse, Fall 2018
Faculty: Jimmy Carter
About the studio:
Monasticism—and, by extension, a monastery—is a withdrawal from the world, a liberation from objects, social bonds, temptations, and distractions, allowing the complete dedication of the self to spirituality. This withdrawal can be individual or collective. In Carthusian charterhouses, inhabitants make a collective attempt to live together in isolation according to established rules. This studio explored the architecture of the Carthusian monastery as a paradigmatic experiment of common living: an introverted collective form—constituted by an archipelago of private and shared rooms of various sizes—but also an extroverted machine, an outpost for seizing unknown territories of the world as the subconscious extensions of the soul.