If you drive by car over the Reschenpass in the Vinschgau, an impressive sight reveals itself to you after a quarter of an hour.

Clinging to the slope is a white religious fortress: Marienberg Monastery, Europe's highest Benedictine monastery at 1,350 meters above sea level.

In 1149, the founders from the nearby Engadin found the current location.

In its long history of eventful development phases, the monastery experienced a standstill in the second half of the 20th century, until Abbot Bruno Trauner commissioned the architect Werner Tscholl from the South Tyrolean municipality of Latsch in the last days of 1999 to renovate the farm building, which had been unused for years to convert into a museum.

It took five years to get started on the project,

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

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Marco Mulazzani, who teaches history of architecture in Ferrara, documents what has been created here since the mid-nineties in a bilingual volume, which should not only be of interest to the fifteen thousand visitors to the monastery each year.

Tscholl is an architect known throughout Italy. He built one of six Messner Mountain Museums in the ruins of Sigmundskron Castle near Bozen, and he was allowed to immortalize himself in Segrate near Milan in the immediate vicinity of the Mondadori publishing house designed by Oscar Niemeyer.

While he prefers radical designs in private residential construction, in Marienberg he has committed himself to building in existing buildings.

espresso mug and pewter plate

In Abbot Markus Spanier, a trained banker, he had a farsighted builder who, like in earlier centuries, sees church building as a driver of innovation.

And as a good investment.

He could be sure of the support of the province of South Tyrol, whose preservation of monuments knows about the value of the Marienberg cultural monument.

The monastery library contains 100,000 volumes plus 1,400 parchment manuscripts, the oldest from 1149.

Tscholl has rededicated the dining room of the former monastery school as an inviting gesture for the arriving visitors, it arouses curiosity about the monastery courtyard.

Instead of the gable roof, he put a flat roof, the transparent facade can always be redesigned as a kind of media shop window, with writing or exhibits (espresso mugs, pewter plates and plaster reliefs were recently staged).

The architect placed the treasury, the museum, administration rooms, guest apartments and a communal kitchen in the former farm building.

One of the most beautiful workplaces in the Alps

Its language is consciously reduced: pigmented exposed concrete, black, waxed steel plates for the galleries, frosted glass and indirect lighting.

In the northern part of the building there are lounges and bedrooms for youth groups, all lined with larch pine.

The former smithy behind the building block was converted into a visitor café using the existing technology.

For a long time, Marienberg was the only way to go to secondary school in the upper Vinschgau;

in addition, the monastery in Meran ran a high school.

Italian fascism ended this tradition in 1928, which was continued after the Second World War until 1986 when it finally came to an end.

An exhibition in the main building with a rich inventory of scientific devices and exhibits that were used in the classroom commemorates the heyday of this educational history.

The architectural highlight is undoubtedly Tscholl's relocation of the monastery library underground.

From the carriage house next to the entrance of the abbey church, which has also been modernized, a path leads along the monastery wall to the former St. Giles church.

It now serves as a reading room and entrance hall.

A steel spiral staircase in a glass cylinder leads down to the library, which is kept at a constant temperature all year round by a cooling system on the outer walls.

The engine room of the educational steamer unfolds an impressive spatial effect.

Polished concrete floor, the walls with lively patterns left by the OSB panels used as formwork.

The shelves are made of stained ash.

In the mighty black cover a quote from the "Registrum" of the Marienberg Abbot Goswin,

who wrote a history of the monastery in the fourteenth century.

The illuminated letters and the electrics were concreted in the wrong way round, a process that the abbot and the architect – keyword innovation – are proud of.

The fortified tower on the valley side houses the monastery archive: the archivist's workplace, with its all-round view of the three-thousanders of the Ötztal Alps and in the south to the Ortler Group, is probably one of the most beautiful in the entire Alpine region.

Marco Mulazzani: "Marienberg Abbey/Abbazia Monte Maria".

With photographs by René Riller.

Electa architettura, Milan 2022. 144 p., ill., hardcover, €33.25.