Pastoral centre, Rijeka

According to both popular and official religious legend, heavenly angels brought the house in which the Virgin Mary received the Annunciation to the top of Trsat Hill in 1291. Unfortunately, they took it away again the following year (Loreto in Italy was the lucky recipient) and in compensation for the loss, Pope Urban V presented Trsat with a holy icon of the Virgin and Child. So began the history of the Trsat Sanctuary. In more recent times, the late Pope John Paul II paid a brief pastoral visit to the city and its sanctuary in 2003. He blessed the cornerstone of a projected (but at that stage undesigned) Pastoral Centre that would house all the activities that cannot take place in the existing church due to its modest size and the growing numbers of pilgrims.

Five years later, a house has reappeared on top of Trsat Hill. The new multi-purpose hall and parvis was not delivered by angels but by Randić-Turato Architects, a local studio that is starting to make a name for itself in Europe. The hall's tent-like covering resembles the archetypical pitched-roof barn. Still, there is nothing vulgar in this simple metaphor that any child can easily understand. Thanks mainly to the reduced abstract materiality of the whole, it is highly appropriate to the practical and modest nature of the popular Order of Friars Minor (better known as Franciscans).

The hall is not a church although its interior space would be quite suitable for a holy service. Its interior walls are painted in the light Papal colours of yellow and white; auxiliary spaces in the dark brown of the Franciscan habit. The disposition of the central gathering space and the meandering circulation spaces around it is reminiscent of medieval churches with their labyrinthine galleries. Still, the character of interconnected spaces, at least during the day, is pretty much 'of this world'. All the furniture and fittings, again reflecting the same archetypal but consciously contemporary design, are also by Randić-Turato Architects.

The most interesting aspect of the hall is its 'habit'. Monolithic in appearance, it is composed of different-sized thin terracotta bricks laid in such a way as to allow light to penetrate the interior in certain places without destroying the rock-like unity of the volume. Monastic seclusion and almost secular openness meet in this thin layer suspended from a steel grid attached to the concrete bearing structure of the hall. Simple but refined, it is neither wall nor skin, both enclosing and exposing its contents. Inside, diffused natural light of different intensities amplifies sometimes distorted spatial relations, creating a few unexpected moments of contact between the bright main hall and dark encompassing corridors. At night, those relations are reversed. The monolithic body radiates light into its picturesque and sleepy surroundings without revealing its essence, creating an archetypical mystic experience.

The parvis in front of the hall is a slightly sloping square with colonnades on two sides and open to the monastery and a green meadow on the other two sides. Its enclosure follows the natural slope of the hill in which it is partly embedded. The bare concrete of the colonnades is another reflection of the simplicity of the Franciscan order. In this enclosed and covered but open and airy space confessions are heard during the pilgrimage season when the church itself becomes too small to accommodate all the believers. A contemporary echo of medieval pilgrims' courtyards where people used to sleep in the arcades, has been created here and although it is hard to write about the religious significance of space today, a certain numinous quality has been achieved here that even unbelievers must feel.

To believe that the Virgin's house was brought from Nazareth to Trsat by angels and then flown on to Loreto after the angels had rested, was perhaps easy in times when the Christian faith was still young and practised with a devotion difficult to comprehend in our secular times. Yet the radiant, monolithic body of a simple house on the hill with its austere concrete colonnades succeeds in making us ponder the reasons for our existence. Might this place of Christian worship become a place of architectural pilgrimage as well?