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Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Retreat Center
Spring 2022 Studio 4, Watercolor and Graphite
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Our Lady of Refuge Catholic Retreat Center, full block of drawings. Watercolor wash and graphite.
For this project, we were tasked with creating a Catholic retreat center in eastern Kansas. I thought that working in a rustic Spanish Mission language would be fitting, both because it would pay homage to some of the early Catholic missionaries of the New World and because it is so versatile, allowing for a range in design from highly vernacular mission style to high Spanish Baroque.
I knew that I wanted to follow a monastic layout. There is an initial courtyard with colonnades that lead you to the atrium, which leads to the refectory to the South, the library to the North, and chapel to the East. Surrounding the chapel are a pair of cloisters lined with cells, and in the very east is a colonnaded walkway. This design is supposed to leave one with a serene, peaceful feeling to allow one to be able to hear God’s Voice. We were required to produce two elevations, a plan, a site plan, a detail, and three sections for this project.
Above: Design esquisses in increasing levels of refinement. Micron pen.
Above: Front elevation, published in The Classicist No. 19. Watercolor wash and graphite rendering.
