Workshop at Nový Dvůr

John Pawson completed in a remote part of Bohemia a wokshop to house the small-scale industrial activities of the Monastery of Our Lady Of Nový Dvůr: a building that sits low in the falling landscape, minimising its visual impact on the site.

John Pawson, Workshop of the Monastery of Our Lady Of Nový Dvůr, Bohemia, Czech Republic

After designing the Abbey of Our Lady of Nový Dvůr, in a remote part of Bohemia, John Pawson completed a workshop for the monastery.

Alongside the repeating daily cycle of services and private prayer, the monastic day stipulates time dedicated to manual work. At Nový Dvůr, this manual work includes the manufacture of hand cream and the packaging of mustard, the sale of which should generate sufficient income to cover the monastery’s day-to-day running costs.

Workshop at Nový Dvůr — John Pawson, Workshop of the Monastery of Our Lady Of Nový Dvůr, Bohemia, Czech Republic

The workshops designed to house these small-scale industrial activities are sited to allow the building to become a natural extension of the existing patterns of circulation. Although substantial in plan, the new architecture sits low in the falling landscape, minimising its visual impact on the site as a whole.

The language of the elevations draws on the vocabulary developed for the wider Novy project – inspired by St Bernard of Clairvaux’s twelfth-century blueprint for Cistercian architecture, with its emphasis on light, simplicity of proportion and clarity of space – enriched with new elements of pattern and texture.