Located in the center of the “Madre Tierra” field, a place of orange, avocado, and lemon crops, in Montemorelos, Nuevo León. This project was born of a spiritual need: build a reflection space for the family and the community. This need calls for a respectful and perceptive architectural approach. The in-depth study of Christian liturgy and the northeastern countryside founded the design process. The “Capilla San José” is where faith and the countryside coexist in the same celebrational space.
As a social institution with strong ties to the Catholic Church, it makes perfect sense for the “Santa Casa da Misericórdia” to add a new chapel and mortuary to the existing structure.
The new proposal, although a semi-private religious structure, is intended to be open to the general public, which construction commenced in 2008, and was only completed in 2021.
Fostering a spiritual community has always been at the heart of the mission of St Mary Mercy hospital. The first building of the current campus was established in 1959 by a group of Felician Sisters to serve a community in urgent need of healthcare as the auto industry grew exponentially. Since this time, the population of the region has continued to grow and become more demographically and spiritually diverse. Reflecting this, the programmatic scope of this project includes a Roman Catholic Chapel, a reflection room and a Muslim prayer room.
Wesleyan House Methodist Church embraces a challenging site in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. The building both provides a serene sanctuary space for worshippers in this bustling location and enriches the surrounding urban fabric. The project stands on a teardrop-shaped site at the corner of Queen’s Road East – a major four-lane road, and Kennedy Road. The site itself is tight: as 11,000m² of program needs to fit on an 800m² plot, the building inevitably needs to go up.
As such, the design creates a vertical church, integrating the sanctuary, chapels, activity halls, social service floors, and pastoral offices into a tower. Wesleyan House building defines its skyline by slanting gently and subtly from the base to the top to project its image as a religious institution.
The resulting skyscraper church offers unique opportunities to create signature spaces for worship. The sky chapel on the top floor of the tower boasts sweeping views of the harbor to the north and the hills to the south, creating a unique space that takes advantage of the beauty of the surroundings.
The geometry takes up the planimetric shape of the existing cemetery, reinterpreting the architectural elements that characterize the area in a contemporary key. The perimeter wall is the generating system of the composition. The intent is to create a clear contrast that allows to highlight the emblematic historical cemetery and to create a synergy with it, so as to enhance the ancient \”Kirchhof\”. From the old cemetery the visitor enters the courtyard and an arcaded area where cinerary urns and the ossuary are located. To emphasize the sacredness of this space, a large skylight was inserted which acts as a pivot between the space of the columbaria and the retaining wall to the north. The zenithal light that comes from the large truncated pyramid on the surfaces of concrete walls create a changing and ephemeral geography of shadows. The boundary wall is extruded, and the various functions are organized in its thickness. The projections above the retaining wall create a portico that, in full local tradition, embraces the courtyard for interment, offering to visitors a sheltered place. The contrast between the concrete and the bronze of the panels and lamps represents the only stylistic note in an austere and deliberately abstract context.
Within the framework of the Capilla País project, during the first weeks of the summer of 2019, more than 500 university volunteers traveled to different locations in Chile to build 15 chapels to provide meeting and prayer spaces for people in small and vulnerable communities in the country, where people practice their faith collectively, simply and honestly, far from the institutional crisis of the church and its hierarchies. The proposed and executed project is based on the following design principles:
Symbolic Character: A structure clearly recognizable as a chapel, encouraging prayer as well as the realization of social activities. Using the most elementary image of a church, based on a symmetrical structure with a gable roof.
The chapel is built on the campus of ‘CIAAR: Center for Integration and Improvement of Aeronautics, where people from different university backgrounds train to serve as officers, working in their respective professions.
The urbanistic plan for the complex, and its 22 buildings, was done by João Diniz Arquitetura, and the chapel is there as one of the places that can be frequented by the neighboring communities.
This house, located in Alvorada do Sul, in a site right next to the Paranapanema River was an amazing opportunity to explore the relation between built and natural environment. The design seeks to adapt to the geography, the lengthy shape of the site and to appreciate the beautiful view over the wetlands of the river, quite wooded in the section.
Being so, the design takes party of the topography to assume a role of a belvedere for this holiday house. The volume is then divided in two retangular blocks – private and social. The volumes are slightly miss-aligned, to create movement and independence.
The chapel of The Holy Cross is a timeless religious building, an interconnecting bridge between the past, the present and the future. It translates symbolism and millennia of tradition and belief into space with a materiality based on the simplicity and harmony of contemporary architecture. Purity of belief is celebrated in this minimalistic design devoid of earthly distractive elements. The chapel is the third building of the Terra Mater trilogy of underground buildings. Proposed for the island of Serifos, it possesses a single cliff façade that faces the Aegean sea, positioning the human vis a vis with the beauty and magnanimity of creation. The chapel of the Holy Cross is a complete, evocative study of aesthetics, structure, function and engineering enhanced by tradition and featured in a contemporary style, which thoroughly detailed awaits solely for its realisation.
The People’s Chapel is a small church sitting on a 200sqm sliver of land in a mature landed residential estate. The original church occupied a single storey corner terrace built in the 1940s. Plans for rebuilding came about after heavy downpour in October 2010 caused serious damage, rendering it unsafe for occupation.
The unique setting of a religious building in a residential area caused concern to the planning authority. A protracted 4-year appeal process eventually rezoned the residential site as Place of Worship in April 2015, with the total floor area capped at original building footprint. Completed in September 2017, rebuilding this church took 7 years.
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