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 Music Forum integrates St. Mary‘s Church into a complete ensemble, in which the profaned church clearly dominates the urban space.
For this reason, the church interior becomes the central foyer and meeting place in the Music Forum. Thus, it becomes the heart of the Music Forum, where the nave emphasizes its urban dominance and at the same time marks the entrance to the building on Viktoriastrasse.
Also from the exterior, the church becomes the central building block of the Music Forum. Structures are arranged on both sides of the church building, oriented directly on the side of the nave and interlocking with it on the interior. On the south side of the church is the concert hall, on its north side the multifunctional space.
Designing a church seems to us to be an ideal instrument in searching for a symbolic, mystical and expressive dimension. As History has taught us, the alliance between art and religion offers mankind unique, magical and exalting moments that enrich life, mind and soul.
The church, as a material construction and human representation of the Divine, plays a very important role in the development of sensibility. For believers and lay people, it is a living sign that conveys a transcendent meaning that makes us look beyond what we see, and take time to feel our lives at a deeper level.
The San Juan María Vianney Church enjoys a magnificent view from the northern mountain range of Venezuela towards the Caribbean Sea and is part of the rural community La Media Legua, approximately two and a half hours from Caracas, in the state of Vargas. The church is designed to receive 200 people from nearby areas, many of whom travel by foot. The project also contemplates bedrooms and spaces for spiritual retreats for a future phase.
The context of the project is already contained in the same title of the project task: Church St. Ana and Social center Vežica. This public and social context is only enhanced by the presence of a school in direct contact with the location of the project, but also the park that connects everything, and functions as a certain 'green spine'. The church is therefore in direct dialogue with the social center and park, so the project puts emphasis on these two spatial relations by means of an 'atrium' and a 'porch', two strong architectural elements trough which a place becomes a 'position'.
The new church convinces through its self-confident appearance at this busy location in the industrial area at the edge of the city of Murten.
The building is divided into two main bodies: The hall which is 11 meters high and the side wing which is 3.80 meters high. Those two structures close the space against the street. Together with the surrounding wall, the plant room and the four existing plane trees they build a protected outside space from where one can enter the foyer. The hall offers 150 seats and grants the building with its big hight the required presence in this barren landscape.
Article source: RABATANALAB + Francesco Paolo Zaccaro
Relationship With the Urban Environment
The lot is located in the north-east/south-east expansion zone of the old urban area. The land is located on two different altitudes and cut by a steep road. The new expansion lines give the site an ideal size of hinge between the old town and the new urbanization.
The church will have the task of orienting, disposing itself, as in history has always been, “ad orientem”. With the facade facing west and the apse area to the east, the church appears as an isolated body.
Tags: Italy, Oppido Lucano Comments Off on New Parish Complex of Saints Peter and Paul in Oppido Lucano, Italy by RABATANALAB + Francesco Paolo Zaccaro
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.
Designed as an intimate sanctuary for quiet, individual prayer, the new adoration chapel on the St Pius campus is a subtle sculptural addition to the landscape.
In meetings prior to the start of design, congregants were clear that the new chapel should complement the formal character of the adjacent 1960s church and its striking, monumentally-scaled copper roof, which rises in orchestrated planes from ground level to more than 75 feet above the church floor.
The new chapel is a delicately-placed, quiet counterpoint to the adjacent church, contrasting in scale but similar in form and material. The tall, angled shape of the chapel ties the building to its neighbor and creates a soaring space for worshippers within—a cathedral for one. The sculpted form is carefully carved on two sides and at the roof, allowing light to leak in from above the ceiling, along the floor, and adjacent to the sacred tabernacle.
Article source: HILLE MELBYE ARKITEKTER AS and Dahle Einar – Arkitekt MNAL
Concept
“Teglen” is conceptually perceived as a brick volume, elevated from the public town square and gently inserted into the adjacent sloping terrain. The key act of lifting the introvert ceremonial functions up over the ground floor lets the extrovert functions such as café, activity rooms and municipal services connect to the town square. With its red brick flooring, the town square connects the building with the train platforms like a “red carpet”.
The iconic east façade, the “wall of kings”, rises vertically up over the town square, establishing a clear orientation and a strong fond motif. The resulting shape of the building draws resemblance and reference to both traditional church spires and the towering brick chimneys of the Spikkestad brick factory formerly situated on the neighboring property.
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