For the Bay Area’s largest and most historic synagogue, everything old is new again – thanks to a modernisation that seamlessly connects 21st-century design with a century-old landmark.

Completed in 1925 by Bakewell & Brown – the prolific San Francisco architecture firm responsible for a number of notable buildings including San Francisco City Hall, the City of Paris department store and the San Francisco Art Institute – Temple Emanu-El was constructed in the Byzantine Revival style as an homage to the Second Temple of Jerusalem, an ancient place of Jewish worship. And, although the beloved synagogue has remained the centre of life and worship for one of California’s oldest congregations, accessibility issues and necessary seismic upgrades had significantly impacted its ability to serve the Jewish community for nearly four decades.

Finally, after nearly five years of research and planning, and almost two-and-a-half years of construction, the 100-year-old structure is welcoming its community as intended, thanks to the vision of Mark Cavagnero Associates, one of San Francisco’s preeminent architecture firms.

'It is humbling to have been given the opportunity to re-envision the building and advance the institution's mission,' says founding principal Mark Cavagnero, who was tasked with making the necessary updates while honouring the synagogue’s heritage.

The result is a landmarked structure that, with the addition of 19,000 sq ft of programming and gathering spaces, thoughtfully blends historic and contemporary materials while fulfilling the long overdue accessibility and seismic requirements.

'For me, bringing back that sensibility and restoring the historic grandeur of the temple’s original concept was really important,' Cavagnero says, 'but we also needed to make the building more secure in these modern times.'

To that end, Cavagnero and his team inserted a two-storey glass and bronze structure that wraps around the courtyard’s interior perimeter and houses new community and education spaces. 'The congregation wanted to add quite a bit of space in that area,' explains Cavagnero. 'It’s what senior Rabbi Jonathan Singer called "sticky space", where people could socialise and have more of a communal experience.'

Elsewhere, within the existing structure, a gently curved bridge was constructed to connect the two sides of the lobby (putting you at eye-level with rich architectural details that otherwise went unnoticed), and a monumental – albeit previously inaccessible – tower was carved out to add a floor in place of a stairway leading to the courtyard.

Another key area of focus was the children’s preschool and play area that were relocated from the courtyard and basement levels up to the fourth-floor rooftop. 'Before, you could look in the windows off Lake Street directly into the classrooms, so they had to put screening over the historic bronze gates [to the courtyard],' the architect explains, noting how seriously the synagogue takes safety.

But perhaps the most meaningful and significant change was the re-establishment and restoration of the temple’s original grand entry on Lake Street, which had been closed since 1990 due to accessibility laws. 'They’d lost probably the most important part of the architecture – the actual relationship that took you from the street into the sanctuary,’ notes Cavagnero. 'The majesty, the history, and sense of tradition dating back to the Second Temple were lost.'

Now, without a staircase impeding entry for mobility-challenged congregants, a new glazed entry lobby at street level means everyone can enter through building’s tremendous arch as initially envisioned by Bakewell & Brown. 'That which is new is very new, and that which is old is very respected, restored and revered,' Cavagnero reflects.

A new tiny church in Denmark is intended to reimagine contemporary sacred space. The small, 12-sided wooden building was designed by Danish architect Julius Nielsen, who was selected from over 100 entries in a 2023 design competition, initiated by Hans Egedes Parish and the Church Foundation. The project, completed in collaboration with timber flooring manufacturer Dinesen, has just opened its doors. The modest 75 sq m Tiny Church Tolvkanten can be found in Copenhagen’s North Harbour district.

Inside Tiny Church Tolvkanten

The religious building's interior is honest and raw. It has been entirely crafted from wood and steps away from the stone and iconography found in many of Denmark's traditional churches. Its timber construction and scale also mean it has been hailed as Denmark’s second most sustainable building (the project's Life Cycle Assessment has found it produces a mere 2.8 kg CO₂e/m²/year meaning it has a very low carbon footprint).

The floors, altar and font are made from Douglas fir, while offcuts have been repurposed for skirtings and door reveals. The floorplan is arranged in a web-like pattern, which is framed by a central skylight, making for a warm, yet spacious environment.

Nielsen’s goal was to deliver a new approach to the traditional church concept. The idea was to expand on what a church is perceived to be, making it more than a place of worship, but also an area for concerts, yoga and community dinners, for example. In addition, the building's modular design allows it to be dismantled and relocated.

‘Tiny Church Tolvkanten blends modest scale with meticulous attention to detail,’ says Nielsen. ‘Unlike traditional churches that use symbols and sacred images, this sanctuary looks inward. Its sacred essence is instead derived from the architecture, carefully chosen materials, and the gentle filtering of daylight. The high-quality Douglas fir floor, with its thoughtfully positioned boards and rich textures, creates a warm and resonant atmosphere, imbuing the space with depth.’

dinesen.com
juliusnielsenoffice.com

A new chapel in the Czech Republic’s South Moravia region creates a striking new focal point for the community. Its design grace and elegance are paired with modern wood architecture, robust construction and a high degree of community involvement.

Explore the new Our Lady of Sorrows Chapel

Designed by Jan Říčný and Michal Říčný of Studio RCNKSK, Our Lady of Sorrows in Nesvačilka is a religious structure that rises up above the softly rolling landscape on the edge of the village, surrounding by new planting that has yet to bed in. The community’s had apparently yearned for a worship space of its own for well over a century, but it took the determined effort of Father René Strouhal and his parishioners to bring the building to life.

As Jan Říčný notes, the priest’s vision was to ‘create a building that would not only shape the surrounding landscape but would also influence the culture, society, and heritage of this place. Little did I know at the time that this decision would set us on a twelve-year journey,’ he adds.

For the architect, the surrounding landscape posed something a challenge. With no geographic features other than ‘soil and fields’, Říčný decided to use stone and wood to craft the cylindrical form of the chapel. ‘Natural materials are rare in this region,’ he explains, ‘and they hold symbolic significance: to bring faith into a parched landscape.’ Furthermore, the hilltop site accentuates the image of the chapel as a beacon, ‘a point of orientation both in space and in spirit.’

The layers of construction also reflect the church’s patroness, Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. ‘Upon the dust and soil of this place, which form the floor, we build a temple,’ says Říčný . The lower section is formed from a ring of gneiss stones determined to represent humanity and the community itself (‘stubborn, disobedient, and difficult to mould,’ says Říčný).

The upper part of the walls are formed from wood, a thousand different pieces joined together with traditional peg and wedge fixings yet crafted using CNC milling processes. The wood forms a circular armour that envelopes the interior of the chapel, yet also shines out a welcoming light in the evening.

Inside, fixed and supported by the stone base, are seven 15m long hand-carved wooden beams, reaching diagonally through the interior space to support the roof with its steel spire. Symbolising the Seven Sorrows of Mary, they form a literal connection between the earth and the heavens, with a ripple of diagonally placed windows that run around the perimeter bringing sunlight into the interior at all times of the day.

The new planting includes an apple orchard, both as an avenue that leads up the hill and as an orchard that connects the chapel to the working landscape around it. The stations of the cross are also set into the landscape in a ring around the edge of the chapel.

‘The perspective of the beams and surrounding structure draws you upward,’ says the architect, ‘The chapel transcends time. What you experience is its expression, the play of light, acoustics, and scent. The materials are natural, tactile, and imbued with craftsmanship, aiming to lift you beyond the everyday.’

The length of the project was largely down to the fundraising process, as the entire building was paid for by donations. For Říčný, the process gave him time to refine the design. ‘I could carefully consider the technical and symbolic aspects, ensuring meticulous execution,’ he says, helping bring this beautifully built structure to life for the community that wanted it for so long.

RCNKSK.com

The location of this Istanbul mosque, the island of Büyükada, about an hour away via a ride on the city's historic vapur (ferry), is a welcomed detachment from the Turkish metropolis' intense bustle. Once the summer getaway of Istanbul’s well-heeled Greek, Armenian, and Jewish people, and members of the Ottoman court, former lavish residences line the car-free streets in between flowering trees and private gardens. Here, on the island’s northwestern side, an old mosque with great functional inadequacies was replaced with a new design, created by the Istanbul-based architecture practice Degostudio.

Step inside this modern Istanbul mosque

Deviating entirely from the typical mosque style seen all over Istanbul, Degostudio focused on a structure of original aesthetic that aims to harmonise with its surroundings. A 'different' mosque emerged, replacing the old, with a contemporary, structurally competent design, which solved previous functional issues such as a lack of disabled access and natural light and air.

Located on a relatively small parcel of 200 sq m, the project features seemingly fragmented walls – the mosque’s main façade elements. This feature was the result of the parcel layout and the relationship of facing Qibla. To increase the worship space (and capacity), the mosque’s mass was positioned symmetrically, narrowing from two sides towards the mihrab, which can be viewed from every point of prayer within the main space.

Two more elements complete the main mosque mass: a staircase that provides access to the mezzanine and is surrounded by curvilinear walls, and the minaret itself, the building’s only vertical element. Without a dome, often found in the classic mosque design, the minaret of the new Nizam Mosque is the only indicator of its religious symbolism.

Vertical joinery placed between segmented walls not only lightens the structure but also allows for natural light to stream into the interior during the day, following the movement of the sun as it's felt within the space. 

To prevent thermal load within the building, especially on hot summer days, metal sunshades were placed in front of the mihrab joinery. Inspired by traditional patterns, the ornate shadows that fall within the interior at different times of the day act as a form of dynamic decoration.

Overall, decorative elements were kept modest, and include Kufic inscription on the exterior wall. Specially designed hexagonal ceramics on the mosque’s side walls, reminiscent of the traditional Iznik tile designs, and the carvings on the wooden entrance door were influenced by traditional decorations. 

Once again deviating from the typology's norm, the mihrab was treated as a niche, devoid of ornaments, and the pulpit is a simple cantilever staircase. The wood-panelled, suspended ceiling is completed with opening skylights at two points, allowing for hot air to be diffused naturally.

dego.studio

Arriving at Longarone on a slow train from Venice, zigzagging up the Piave Valley into the jagged heights of the Dolomites, the visitor is faced by a gruff modern road and, on the other side, the unresponsive façades of indifferent 1960s buildings. It seems so very disappointing. Why would anyone build like this in such an eagle’s nest setting?

A two-minute walk from the station explains the out-of-place character of this mountain town. Here, in a small bus station square is one of the most extraordinary of all 20th-century European churches. Antithetical in terms of texture, composition and presence to every other building in Longarone, it’s as if a meteorite has crashed and, trying to raise itself from fractured ground, has morphed into some otherworldly formation. Comprising a pair of intersecting and spiralling concrete amphitheatres – one internal, the other external – the Church of Santa Maria Immacolata, consecrated in 1983, is, in fact, a late-flowering masterwork by Italian architect Giovanni Michelucci, who died in 1990 at the age of 99.

The story of Giovanni Michelucci's Church of Santa Maria Immacolata

Commissioned in 1966, Santa Maria Immacolata is both a parish church and a memorial to the 1,450 citizens of Longarone killed on the night of 9 October 1963 by a megatsunami caused by a landslide crashing into the nearby Vajont Dam, triggering a 250m-high wave that engulfed the town. Ahead of it, a force of air on a par with the power of a nuclear bomb hit Longarone first. The town was almost completely flattened. Which is why, rebuilt at a pace in the 1960s, the buildings seem disappointing when first seen from the railway station.

From the church’s external amphitheatre, gained by winding ramps, you can look towards the disused Vajont Dam. It is a disconcerting sight. Behind it, the geologically nervous Monte Toc, which is prone to landslides, is known as the ‘Walking Mountain’, while its very name in the local Friulian dialect means ‘soggy’ or ‘rotten’. The church, with its exploded architecture, sits in counterpoise to the rugged mountain landscape. 

Although rugged, too, Santa Maria Immacolata is, nevertheless, well crafted as a visitor should expect of a building by an architect born into an Arts and Crafts tradition. Michelucci’s family were craft metalworkers. The curving concrete seats of the internal amphitheatre, surrounding a raised marble altar, are capped with mountain fir. A handless statue of the Virgin Mary, from the pre-tsunami church – found in the Piave River miles to the south – surprises you from a votive altar. Bells rise in a stylised sail. A poignant crypt reached from the ramps shrouds architectural and decorative fragments from the earlier church.

Santa Maria Immacolata is sombre and haunting, a journey of the soul up to the mountains and down again along an enigmatic architectural path. Certainly, Michelucci, a religious man, was a master of commemorative and solemn architecture realised in unexpected ways. Who could not be surprised by his earlier autostrada church, San Giovanni Battista (1960-64), set at the intersection of the A1 and A11 motorways on the fringes of Florence? 

Its sinuous copper roof covers the asymmetric stone-clad concrete building like the folds of a Biblical tent, while the columns supporting the roof form a mesmerising architectural grove. Where else can you find a motorway service area like this? Rather than offering drinks and snacks, it asks those parking here to pray for the souls of the 164 workers who died building the Autostrada del Sole. Stopping for petrol, you can also find spiritual solace.

Born in the Tuscan city of Pistoia, Michelucci studied architecture at Florence’s Academy of Fine Art. His head filled with Futurist ideals, he served as a soldier in the First World War. Post-war, while building and publishing critical magazines, he made his name coordinating Gruppo Toscano, a group of young architects, which won the competition to design Florence’s new Santa Maria Novella railway terminus. As beautiful today as it was when completed in 1934, the station is a fusion of ideas inspired as much by the Viennese Secessionists Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann, and by Frank Lloyd Wright, as by Italian discourse.

Under the patronage of a much-impressed Marcello Piacentini – Mussolini’s favourite Italian architect – Michelucci worked in Rome on the new university and on EUR, the imposing southern entrance to the city that opened in the guise of an Expo in 1942. The Second World War intervened, and it was wartime damage to Florence that pushed Michelucci in a wholly new direction. When his ideas for the rebuilding of Florence were rejected – he stood against the ‘museumification’ of the city – he took up the post of professor of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bologna and began to experiment ever more radically with design. What should the contemporary architect’s relationship to history be? What, he wanted to know, was the limit before architecture became arbitrary?

Michelucci experimented with the design of elemental vernacular churches that – giveaway concrete elements aside – might be from almost any century, and created buildings with ambitious open spaces set under equally adventurous roofs (including one for a Pinocchio theme park near Pistoia).

Santa Maria Immacolata took Michelucci’s quest for new types of structure and space into the realm of, if not the arbitrary, then perhaps the near transcendent. It is certainly worth making a design pilgrimage to Longarone. In an otherwise visually prosaic town centre, Michelucci has shaped an architectural odyssey, a true laboratory of space aligning the man-made with the uncertainties of nature, balancing the concerns of life, death and whatever might lie, this side of landslides, beyond those forbidding mountain peaks. 

A version of this article appears in the April 2024 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

First Christian Church, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and completed in 1942, is widely considered to be the first modernist architecture church in the United States. Designated a national Historic Landmark in 2000, the structure features a tower that soars six levels above ground, and also includes a basement and a cistern in a sub-basement. Its walls are entirely constructed of brick – 29 inches thick at the base, tapering to 17 inches thick at the top. When repair works commenced, its precast concrete grilles had been replaced with plastic panels.

First Christian Church: a landmark's restoration journey

The 166ft freestanding tower, readily visible from vantage points throughout downtown Columbus, had fallen into a dire state of disrepair, which necessitated the first comprehensive restoration of the tower in the eight decades since its construction. 

A condition report prepared by Louis Joyner Architect (LJA) with LI Engineering and The Engineering Collaborative (TEC) in 2014 identified a number of pressing issues – including extensive masonry cracking, excessive amounts of interior water, and significant rust damage throughout. Cracking that occurred in the tower in 2018 prompted a second assessment recommending four major areas of focus: the stabilisation and repair of the upper 50ft (the 'Clock Chamber' level); reconstruction of the 'Zipper'; interior repairs; and ventilation and water vapour control. 

LJA oversaw the tower repair in collaboration with Ratio Architects (preservation consultants), Arsee Engineers (structural engineer), The Engineering Collaborative (MEP), and FA Wilhelm Construction Co (general contractor). The project was overseen by a partnership between First Christian Church, Columbus’ Heritage Fund and Landmark Columbus Foundation.  The $3.2-million, eight-month restoration process began in 2022 and completed in December 2023.

More than 70 donors contributed to the scheme over a 19-month period, according to Tracy Souza, president and CEO of Heritage Fund. Funds were raised both locally and out of town through the Save Our Tower campaign, matched in a grant agreement by the Jeffris Family Foundation, which assists in the development of historic sites for nonprofit organisations in several small towns and cities in the Midwest. Other funding included support from the National Park Service, the National Fund for Sacred Places, and donors John and Sarah Lechleiter, Rick and Alice Johnson, Anthony Moravec, the Irwin Financial Foundation, and the Miller Family.

The stabilisation and repair of the tower’s Clock Chamber levels required the removal of the east and west walls, along with the removal of brick veneer on the north and south faces, and the dismantling of the parapets. The east and west sides were then reconstructed with a concrete block back-up for stability.

The plastic which had replaced the tower’s original precast concrete grilles was substituted with Indiana limestone, carved in the original patterns to simulate the appearance of the tower’s period concrete construction – but with much-enhanced durability. Remaining cracks in the tower’s brick walls and its veneer were fixed.

The 'Zipper' – a stack of 20 openings on the tower’s west side – was reconstructed with new limestone panels that matched its original design. Inside, cracked brick and concrete were restored, and rusted ladders and other steel elements were replaced. 

Infilling of the original concrete grilles of the 'Zipper' with plastic in the past prevented the tower from 'breathing' and releasing collected condensation, resulting in significant interior water vapour damage. So, wherever this had damaged the brick and steel items, repairs were arranged. A powerful new ventilation system along with supplemental heat were installed to prevent future condensation. Finally, the tower’s cistern was sealed.

In November 2023, the congregation of First Christian Church, the community of Columbus, and supporters from around the country celebrated in anticipation of the completion of the tower’s repairs with a musical ceremony, held in the church’s sanctuary. The event honoured towers around the world, including the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Rapunzel’s Tower. First Christian leadership thanked the congregation and all of those who supported the restoration project.

'We are so thrilled to have this tower restored for future generations,' said Richard McCoy, the executive director of Landmark Columbus Foundation. 'Simply put, without this tower Columbus would not be the same place.'

landmarkcolumbusfoundation.org 

heritagefundbc.org

For the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris, set for late 2024, French designer Guillaume Bardet created a series of liturgical objects and furniture. The Gothic cathedral was partly destroyed by a fire in April 2019, which resulted in the collapsing of its roof. 

The renovation has involved carefully restoring the remains, while reproducing its Gothic architectural details as well as recreating the spire that was added in the 19th century by architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc. Bardet, part of Paris' Galerie Kreo's roster and whose work is defined by a sinuous minimalism, was chosen by the Archbishop of Paris during a long and rigorous process. 

Designing Notre-Dame de Paris: Guillaume Bardet's liturgical objects

The designer has been tasked with creating an altar, lectern, cathedra with seats, tabernacle, and baptistery, which he developed in bronze and favouring simple forms that exude a graceful approach that is guided by timelessness. 

The T-shaped lectern, for example, is meant to symbolize freedom, and was the first piece he designed for this space. Similarly, the baptistery draws from the object's ritual circularity and is imagined with flow of people in mind. His intention with these objects, reads a note introducing the project, was 'to embrace organic shapes that evoke a profound sense of permanence and spiritual devotion.'

While the designs appear rigorous and solemn, the design gesture favoured by Bardet resulted in a series of gentle objects that discreetly inhabit the space. 'They should resonate with conviction for Catholics and captivate the attention of non-Christians,' he comments. 'Each element carries its own distinct identity, symbolism, and purpose, yet together they form a cohesive ensemble that engages in a meaningful dialogue. These pieces should exist within and beyond the realm of liturgy: not demanding attention, but also not hiding away. They should have a subtle yet undeniable presence.

'The pieces should embody the essence of the past, embrace the present, and welcome the future.'

Notre-Dame de Paris is set to reopen to the public on 8 December 2024

galeriekreo.com

The 17th-century Chapelle Saint-Michel de Brasparts reopens to the public in July 2023, after a thorough restoration and with new interiors by Ronan Bouroullec. The chapel had been closed for a year, following a series of fires in the surrounding areas, and the restoration was supported by François Pinault.

Restoring the Chapel of Saint-Michel de Brasparts

‘The Chapel of Saint-Michel de Brasparts is a modest building, rectangular in plan, with a canted apse,’ Martin Bethenod, former managing director of the Bourse de Commerce – museum of the Collection Pinault, wrote in a text to introduce the project. ‘The walls are over a metre thick. The Arrée-hills-slate roof rests on an oak frame, magnificently restored by the craftspeople from Ateliers Le Ber in Sizun. The beaten-earth floor is slightly raised in the choir area. The stone walls are lime-rendered. The door of the main west façade is only rarely used. The south door is always open, it has no key, providing refuge, a resting place open to all – passers-by, hikers, pilgrims.’

Perched above the Saint-Michel de Brasparts mountain, the chapel sits on top of a slope characterised by diverse vegetation and terrain. Its rational, modest architecture had caught Bouroullec’s attention since he was a child, as he often drove along the route taking him from the south to the north of France to visit family. 

For the chapel’s restoration, Bouroullec created new furniture, made of locally sourced Nuit Celtique de Huelgoat granite and comprising an altar with a base to hold a cross and candles, and a console table for votive objects. Essential in their appearance yet carefully conceived in proportions and execution, these pieces were created in collaboration with stone mason Christophe Chini from nearby Plonévez-du-Faou. The metal objects, meanwhile, were made by Mathieu Cabioch, an artist–metalworker based in Roscoff who helped Bouroullec create the cross and the candle holders. 

Behind the altar, Bouroullec placed a round mirror, previewed by Galerie Kreo at Design Miami/Basel earlier this year and featuring a rippled surface created with a master glassmaker from Murano and placed in conversation with the chapel’s only decorative elements – namely the stained-glass windows, which, Bethenod notes, were attributed to the Breton master glassmaker Auguste Labouret.

‘The whole challenge of the project lies in the magical operation of creating lightness from mass. To achieve this, the notion of balance was key. Balance in the proportions, applying the rules of the golden ratio to the altar. Balance in the paradoxical relationship between the mass of the block of granite for the console-table, and its virtual suspension on steel legs that extend into candlesticks. Balance between the weight of the mirror and its impalpable, almost unreal quality,’ continues Bethenod. ‘Heavy enough not to be moved, sturdy enough not to be damaged, rough enough not to require cleaning, the elements that Ronan Bouroullec has placed in the chapel must succeed, despite or because of these characteristics, in creating a sensory experience, in establishing an intimate relationship with the sacred.’

Mont Saint-Michel de Brasparts, 29190 Saint-Rivoal, France

@ronanbouroullec

Santuario de La Salle by Carlos Arnaiz Architects (CAZA) is a refreshing take on traditional religious architecture at the De La Salle University campus in Biñan City, the Philippines. The church and community hub is exemplary of CAZA’s practice and sensitivity for exploring how architecture can 'shape meaningful experiences, enhance its context [and] connect people to place and heritage’.

The award-winning Santuario de La Salle (it scooped the 2023 A+ Award in the Religious Buildings & Memorials category) has been widely recognised as an outstanding structure in its genre and built landscape.

CAZA’s Santuario de La Salle at a glance

The building lies nestled within a leafy glade, naturally set apart from bustling scenes at the university campus. Named after the patron saint of teachers, John Baptist de La Salle, the space is designed to offer 'a different idea of spiritual inclusiveness' for educators, students and wider congregating communities. 

At a glance, its strikingly white, organic shape is mysterious in its surrounding context. Only an abstractly formed steeple with a comparatively discreet crucifix alludes to its function. Made softer by the use of raw, textured materials, the structure bears an unexpected yet assured sense of belonging within the surrounding wooded landscape.

Crafting spatial and spiritual journeys  

Vertical slats form a permeable outer skin, breaking up the wide, undulating volume and naturally endowing the structure with a sense of lightness and a sense of transparency. This outer skin also carves out a series of semi-outdoor moments, that help to gently transition congregants into more sheltered, sacred areas within. 

Pockets of circular-shaped rooms linked by these transitionary spaces cater to different religious events at varying levels of formality. The structure is designed to take individuals on a spatial journey, leading them towards congregational hubs where they are made to feel part of a larger, connected group. In this way, the design is sensitive to ideas of individual and communal experiences of faith.

Upon entering the main congregational space, the materiality smoothly transitions to softwoods and brass. In a double-height central core, celestial tilted ceiling features star-like lighting – delicately hanging pendants cast down soft beams of light. Despite representing a departure from the traditional shape of churches, the design does not entirely eschew it; clerestory windows wrap the congregational space’s circumference, to evoke the traditional experience of looking up towards the light.

At multiple moments inside and outside of the scheme, CAZA's design allows people to connect with their faith, community and nature.

Santuario de La Salle
727V+2Q9 De La Salle University Laguna Campus
LTI Spine Road, Laguna Blvd, Biñan, Laguna, Philippines

Cazarch.com 

A Brazilian church, designed by Brasília-based ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo, makes a glorious return to an architecture that celebrates space and landscape as well as faith; welcome to the new Church of the Holy Family in Brasilia.

A Brazilian church inspired by Costa and Niemeyer’s Brasília

The new church is located in the heart of the Brazilian Highlands, the Planalto Brasileiro that shaped the form and scope of Costa and Niemeyer’s Brasília. The architects quote Lucio Costa’s description of this terrain as ‘horizon without limit… out of scale’, a perception addressed by Brasília’s composition as a blend of city and park, a true urban landscape.

The Church of the Holy Family is sited on the edge of the capital, along one of the park roads that was zoned for low-density expansion. The site adjoins the Estrada Parque Indústria e Abastecimento (Park Road of Industry and Supply), an expressway that slices through this carefully planned landscape, giving rise to a rather generic form of roadside commercial development.

In many respects, the new church is a throwback to the roadside modernism of the post-war era, where scale and form were simplified and amplified to be best perceived at speed, as consumers and congregations rush from one place to another in the confines of their cars.

At first glimpse, the Church of the Holy Family certainly conforms to this auto-architecture approach, with a striking concrete tower rising alone out of the landscape to guide the faithful.

The main body of the church is a circular structure, sunk into the landscape and reached by a shallow ramp leading downwards. The roof is ringed with rooflights, bringing natural light down across wood-clad interior walls. These sit above a ring of narrow windows set at ground level, giving the interior a constantly shifting pattern of light throughout the day.

The main church sits above a modest underground chapel, which occupies a small segment of the circle. Both buildings connect to the long, linear annexe building, with two existing structures also located on the site. Shaded by deep concrete brise soleil that run the full length of the façade, this building is also set deep within the landscape, reading as an abstract form.

The architects poetically point out that the ensemble acts as a signpost to the passing traveller, someone ‘in the search for the suspension of the everyday life or for a refuge from the torments of being.’ They also note that the design and landscaping reference Brasília’s ‘three fundamental premises’, an architecture open to the horizon, the inseparability of public and private space, and the role of the landscape as ‘a structuring and fundamental element of the architectural configuration’.

Founded in 2013 by Eder Alencar and André Velloso, ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo is an award-winning practice headquartered in Brasília.

ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo, ARQBR.arq.br

Jamie McGregor Smith has a passion for eccentric ecclesiastic architecture. Over the past couple of years, the Vienna-based photographer has travelled around Europe, capturing images of some of the most distinctive examples of 20th-century religious architecture – modern churches.

This was a project born out of lockdown, beginning shortly after Smith moved to Vienna and discovered the city’s Church of the Most Holy Trinity, or the Wotruba Church, a collaboration between the Austrian sculptor Fritz Wotruba and architect Fritz Gerhard Mayr. ‘It began life as a sculpture, the artist believing its design had been delivered by God in a dream,’ Smith recalls. 

‘I was bewildered that this piece of progressive art, consisting of 152 irregular concrete blocks, had been commissioned by such a conservative institution. It redefined my idea of what a church could be.’

Smith’s photographic pilgrimage continued, taking advantage of the fact that many churches remained open during the pandemic and the general absence of people.

Describing himself as a ‘photographer of civilisation’, Smith has completed projects including studies of post-industrial landscapes and vanishing nature. His work has appeared in Wallpaper*, as well as Vanity Fair and Esquire.

Sacred Modernity – McGregor Smith’s forthcoming book of modern churches – takes in many of the classics of the post-war era, a time of dramatic experimentation with the form and function of the church. Spurred on by the modernising impulses of the Second Vatican Council at the start of the 1960s, with a less proscribed approach to services and ceremonies, the new ecclesiastical architecture is often derided as soulless functionalism, at odds with religious tradition.

There’s nothing remotely dispiriting about the spectacular spaces Smith has visited, which include the mighty concrete interiors of Walter Maria Förderer, Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth, the meticulous lines of Rudolf Schwarz, and the soaring spaces of Ron Weeks’ Clifton Cathedral in Bristol. 

The book is currently being prepared for a limited run, supported by a crowdfunding campaign that’ll snare you a signed first edition. It includes an essay by Jonathan Meades, perhaps the wittiest and most insightful of all contemporary architecture critics, and will be published by Hatje Cantz in spring 2023.

Whatever the flavour of your religious persuasion, an impressive interior will have the power to inspire awe. That’s certainly the case for these architectural wonders, some little known and rarely visited. ‘For a church that depended on cultural relevance and architects that craved carte blanche, this [period] was a marriage made in heaven,’ Smith muses, ‘These building are a portal between two worlds.’

INFORMATION

JamieMcGregorSmith.com

Sacred Modernity can be supported on kickstarter.com

There is something brutal, modest and pure about St John Chrysostom Church in Peckham, says designer Max Lamb, who has created a new altar, sanctuary floor, altar candleholders and a Paschal candleholder for the modernist Anglican church in south London. ‘It’s not adorned with a lot of decorations or carvings as you would see in other churches,’ he adds.

Completed in 1966 and replacing two earlier parish churches that had been bombed in the Second World War, St John Chrysostom has a slanting copper roof, a sawn softwood ceiling and a tower feature above the sanctuary that provides dramatic indirect lighting to the space below. ‘When you’re in the congregation looking at the altar, you don’t see any windows and can’t see where the light is coming from,’ says Lamb. ‘So it creates this diagonal shaft of light which makes for some spectacular effects and shadows.’

Commissioned by the church on behalf of the Diocese of Southwark and produced by art curator and producer Aldo Rinaldi, the project saw Lamb respond to the stark beauty of the building’s architecture and the simplicity of its material palette by keeping his offerings in the same sober but poetic register and sticking to similar materials.

He was keen for the additional elements to have presence, however. ‘When I first visited the church, the original altar was made of brick and wood and the effect of the brick altar against a brick wall backdrop meant it was almost invisible.’ Lamb opted instead for Portland stone for the altar and the candleholders, which not only contrasts well with the surroundings but is also a nod to the fact that one of the previous churches on the site – St Jude’s – had been built out of Portland stone. ‘One of the stone columns from the site was retained and turned into the baptismal font,’ says Lamb. Two other small and unusual elements made out of the same limestone can be found in the church: a cantilevered seat behind the altar and a wall plaque just above it.

The altar is composed of four slabs of Portland stone held together using slot joints and a fifth slab inserted within the four walls. With its cross motifs in the four corners where the legs meet, and its recessed base designed so the parish priest can stand closer to the altar, the finished object looks imposing but has an appealing floating quality despite its weight.

The two candleholders are made of the same sedimentary stone and are cylindrical in shape, while the imposing Paschal candleholder is also cylindrical and made of Portland stone but is quite a bit taller (1.35m) and features a reclaimed teak base for stability that neatly repeats the cross motif of the altar.

The last part of the church Lamb tackled was the stepped, raised sanctuary floor that had been covered in cork and was in a state of disrepair. ‘I am generally very pro cork, but I decided that it was another foreign element in this instance, in that it wasn’t a material that was present elsewhere, so my proposal was not to add something new here but to remove the old and polish the concrete beneath it until it looked honed.’

The new-old floor complements existing concrete elements in the church, such as the original coloured glass and concrete windows designed by Susan Johnson and the large concrete base for the organ pipes. The result, enhanced by highly effective natural and artificial lighting (courtesy of a recent renovation), is a quietly dramatic, uplifting and meditative space with the sculptural altar and candleholders at its heart.

INFORMATION

maxlamb.org

ADDRESS

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London SE15 2UN

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A new church has opened on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The Holy Redeemer is the work of local architect Fernando Menis, and its distinctive form, all raw concrete drama, takes its cues from the Canary Island's volcanic landscape – but also the needs of the local community that it has been designed to serve. Part religious architecture, part community centre, the project is situated in Las Chumberas neighbourhood, a disadvantaged area of the capital La Laguna. 

The community element was central to the concept around the church's concrete architecture, Menis explains: ‘The process of conception and construction of the building overlaps with the process of raising awareness of the neighbourhood towards its own identity and the involvement of its residents in redefining it.’ Indeed, even the project's fundraising was heavily based on the local community, which raised donations, slowly but surely over the course of two decades, in order to make their church and centre a reality. 

Tenerife's geology played a key role in the formation of the final composition too. The building feels firmly rooted to the ground, with four large volumes rising like volcanic rock formations. This series of seemingly discrete sections was practical too; it meant that part of the church (two of the four volumes) could be made independent and completed first to allow the church to be operational, while the community fundraised for the remainder. 

The building appears austere, but carefully slit narrow openings create a mesmerising light-and-shadow play inside, against the raw concrete. There was one more reason for Menis' material selection; concrete is a readily available material in Tenerife and can insulate against the island's hot weather through thick solid walls (which happen to provide great acoustics too).

The scheme has already received critical acclaim for its raw concrete drama and sense of community, with New York’s MoMA including the architect's drawings in its collection. ‘Menis creates a primitive presence for this building that seems even to predate the neighbourhood, providing a sense of an ancient ruin – and indeed, the building has been in use for several years now in a fragment of the intended vessel – anchoring the residents in the powerful sense of place that emanates mostly from natural rather than man-made form in Tenerife,' says MoMA curator Barry Bergdoll. 

INFORMATION

menis.es

The 2021 Stirling Prize nomination of the Cambridge Central Mosque by Marks Barfield Architects raised important questions as to how one should judge a sacred space. Should the defining criteria be aesthetic, cultural or perhaps environmental? I argue for looking at how it treats its female worshippers. The Cambridge Central Mosque heralds itself as being an inclusive, female-friendly mosque; one that seeks to welcome all through its very design. 

When journeying to an unfamiliar mosque, I mentally prepare myself for the possibility of having to either argue my way in or sneak into the building. That is because some mosques, due to cultural and generational differences, can sometimes operate like a social club for men. Even when allowed in, women are often physically marginalised by the very spatial arrangement of the building. Due to limited space or poor design, they can still find themselves isolated from the rest of the congregation, often banished to pray in a windowless cupboard, as the women’s prayer hall is often treated like cycling lanes – a last-minute afterthought.

The single prayer hall for both genders, seen in the original Prophet's Mosque in Medina, a common feature in early Islamic history, is hard to come by in contemporary Britain. This could be due to practical reasons, as most British mosques occupy repurposed buildings that were formerly houses, cinemas and pubs. In addition, the religious obligation of attending the Friday prayer generally falls on men. So those who run a mosque may argue that this exclusion is justified, as women do not attend as frequently. And as most mosques are poorly funded, even in the more inclusive ones, women can still find themselves sequestered away in a separate room, due to limited space or poor design. What distinguishes the Cambridge Central Mosque is that from the onset, women’s needs were central in the design process.

In an early community consultation prior to Marks Barfield’s commission, a survey was taken to gather the opinions and preferences of the diverse group of Muslim women present in Cambridge. The result of this survey was taken on board in the design process and culminated in the creation of three adaptable prayer spaces that met the needs of this culturally diverse community. 

On entering the single prayer hall, women are given a choice of whether to sit behind or in front of the series mashrabiya screens of varying heights present in the space. At the rear end of the prayer hall is another prayer space that is separated by soundproof glass. The design, led by Marks Barfield managing director Julia Barfield, caters to the needs of women with young children. Mothers can still listen and see the wider congregation while their children can run and shout without disturbing other members of the congregation. The space is also equipped with a wet play area and mini mihrab that acts as a focal point of the room.

A set of steps leading off from the mother and children room takes you to the third and final prayer space. Elevated above the main prayer hall is the Baraka Khan Gallery, which gives women a unique vantage point of the swooping internal timber structure.

The low-rise building is devoid of towering minarets and is set back from the road with a portico and communal garden at the front. The mosque is more than just a place of worship – it is a community centre open to all. It features a self-service community café and an education room that is currently hosting an exhibition on Medieval Islamic Scientific Instruments.

I was nervous during my short walk from the train station to the mosque; but this was due to anticipation and not the usual, underlying fear that I might be refused entry. Despite doubts, upon entering the prayer space, I was overcome by both the stillness and warmth of the place.

The Cambridge Central Mosque marks an important turning point in the architectural articulation of Islam in Britain. It serves as a guide for an inclusive, brighter future.

INFORMATION

marksbarfield.com

At her eponymous studio in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she was born and raised, Marina Tabassum is pioneering a new generation of architectural thought, calling for a focus on ‘architecture of relevance’. She says, ‘The market-driven building industry must focus on social and economic equity instead of solely profit-driven practice. We must rethink and re-evaluate our living habits and demands. Small changes can be powerful tools to influence major changes in the world.’

Tabassum has been a radical thinker since childhood. She recalls: ‘I was interested in the creative aspects of things and questioning convention. Architecture offered me the freedom to think and rationalise my queries and to channel my imaginations into reality.’

Pioneering architect Muzharul Islam inspired Marina Tabassum to found her practice in 2005, and her ten-strong studio now has a portfolio that includes museums, community centres and private residences. There is a consistent focus on the relationship that contemporary architecture has with local materials, climate change, culture, history and the community. ‘Every project has a strong research base that accumulates information and engages with the context,' Tabassum explains.

In 2016, she received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for one of her most notable projects, the Bait ur Rouf mosque (above). Situated in a dense neighbourhood on the outskirts of Dhaka, the one-storey building poetically weaves light and vernacular materials, creating modest communal spaces within the busy landscape. Characterised by its raised plinth, light wells and intimate courtyards, the structure provides a humble place of worship where the local community can host events and gatherings.

Marina Tabassum: bettering lives

Tabassum is currently working in the Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, in south-east Bangladesh, and designing mobile modular houses for ultra-low-income people in the country’s coastal areas.

Beyond her humanitarian work, she is a leading advocate for a more environmentally responsible architecture industry. ‘To make a better world, the first step is to realise that we are heading towards extinction as a species because of our actions of the past century and our inaction to change our ways,’ she explains.

She has also been a visiting professor at Dhaka’s BRAC University since 2005. ‘I see teaching as a bridge between generations,’ she says. ‘As a teacher, my responsibility is to inspire students and guide them towards their potential strengths. At the same time, I am rejuvenated by their new ideas and their perceptions of the world and life in general. I feel it's a reciprocal process where one is informed by the other on different levels. Both the teacher and the student grow through the process. That's why I teach.’

As the university’s course coordinator for Contemporary South Asian Architecture, Tabassum has been a keen promoter of architecture that responds to and honours local context. ‘The architecture curriculum in my school where I studied, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, was formulated by Professors from Texas A&M in the 1960s,’ she recalls. 

‘I have learnt the fundamentals and values of good architecture from the Western-centric education system. But in practice, I re-evaluated all my learnings and appropriated them according to the context I practiced in.’ According to Tabassum, ‘every region must appropriate architecture education and practice based on their context and time. One needs to go through a process of unlearning to define one's own architecture practice, process, and language.’ 

Tabassum’s work is human, refined and well-considered. However, what sets her apart from fellow architects is her critical thinking and holistic approach. She isn’t interested in bold, aesthetically pleasing forms but in ways in which she can better the lives of others. ‘A work of architecture may not always result in a building or an object that is visually pleasing,’ she says. ‘Depending on the context, it could mean the wellbeing of the human condition and environment.’ 

INFORMATION

mtarchitekts.com

A version of this article appears in Wallpaper’s October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue (W*270), on newsstands now and available to subscribers – 12 digital issues for $12/£12/€12.
Meet more creative leaders of the future nominated by architect Frida Escobedo here.

The Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles has just unveiled its latest addition. The Audrey Irmas Pavilion is not only famed architecture studio OMA's first California religious commission; it is also its first cultural building in the state. Led by practice partner Shohei Shigematsu, the modern pavilion was concieved as a contemporary addition and counterpoint to the complex's 1929 Byzantine-Revival sanctuary next door. 

The Audrey Irmas Pavilion, named after its lead donor, incorporates a new initiative and community space – the Wallis Annenberg GenSpace, a dedicated facility for ‘older Angelenos’. Flexible spaces that can accomodate meetings of various natures and sizes make up the interiors – although the main gathering spaces comprise the Grand Ballroom, a smaller chapel/event space, and a sunken garden. 

The pavilion’s design makes a bold, contemporary statement in its setting. At the same time, it was important to the architecture team to respect the existing context, which has inspired the volume’s angled walls that lean away gently from the existing historical buildings. 

The pavilion's distinctive façade is key to the lasting impression the building makes. It is made up of 1,230 hexagonal panels of glass fibre-reinforced concrete (GRFC). Meanwhile, practice founder Rem Koolhaas was commissioned especially to design a mezuzah (a piece of parchment in a decorative case containing verses from the Torah) for each door frame within. ‘I was both intrigued and challenged to design these for the doors within the pavilion. [A mezuzah] is an unexpected religious object having to answer explicit religious edicts, laws and rules, which made it totally fascinating for me and a very good lesson to have,’ says Koolhaas. 

‘The making of the Audrey Irmas Pavilion sustained forward momentum through the Covid-19 pandemic, a period in which the act of human interaction was questioned and contemplated,' Shigematsu adds. ‘Its completion comes at a time when we hope to come together again, and this building can be a platform to reinstate the importance of gathering, exchange, and communal spirit.

‘We assembled a constellation of spaces, distinct in form, scale, and aura – an extruded vault enveloped in wood establishes a multifunctional, central gathering space and connective spine; a trapezoidal void draws tones from the temple dome and frames its arched, stained-glass windows; and a circular sunken garden provides an oasis and passage to a roof terrace overlooking LA. Three interconnected voids make the solid form of the pavilion strategically yet surprisingly porous, engaging the campus and the city.

‘The pavilion will support both old and new activities, values, and traditions to foster a renewed energy for gathering.'

INFORMATION

oma.com

Situated on Manchester City’s Cheetham Hill Road, the former synagogue that is now part of the Manchester Jewish Museum was once the focal point of a thriving community and local textile trading industry. Over time, the neighbourhood changed, and eight years ago, the Grade II-listed structure found itself in an ambiguous context of industrial warehouses and ramshackle merchants' buildings. It is in this setting that Citizens Design Bureau began searching for a way to ‘express the messiness and blurred boundaries of the surrounding context’, says practice director Katy Marks. The studio was appointed in 2016, and now, after almost a decade of planning and two years of closure, the new Manchester Jewish Museum is complete and opens its doors to the public.

A collaborative design process with the local community uncovered food as a point of intersection among multiple faiths. This led to a brief reimagining the museum as a public ‘living-room’ with the ability to host community meals and functions, as well as a range of live events.

For this to be successfully realised, it was important that the new extension did not reference any religious iconography that might subsequently reject or exclude certain communities. Externally, this intent is expressed through a perforated, Corten façade that pulls back to create a new entrance, inviting a diversity of visitors and countering the former synagogue building’s overtly religious appearance.

Internally, a well-lit atrium takes visitors through a programme of café, shop and community learning space; the last equipped to host free baking lessons with locals. Upstairs in the new gallery, a large table housing objects from the museum’s collection doubles as a surface for dining, symbolising the union of faith, culture and tradition: the invisible things that hold communities together.

The interior of the deconsecrated synagogue extends this theme of continuity and sharing through a careful restoration that remains faithful to its history as the oldest surviving synagogue in Manchester, while balancing this with the requirement for a fully functioning performance space. ‘It’s very much about not pleasing everyone but telling stories so that it speaks for itself and invites everyone,’ explains Marks. ‘This is a social history museum not a faith museum, and the synagogue is an artefact within that,’ she continues. New is integrated into old seamlessly; sound infrastructures are concealed within the balustrade which, along with the rest of the interior, has been reinstated to the original 19th-century colour palette.

Much like the synagogue’s outward expression, which reflects the geographical origins of Sephardi Jews in North Africa through its Moorish geometric motifs, the new extension reflects an emerging context of openness and exchange by facilitating intercultural dialogue, bridging religious and cultural differences to build on a shared, common experience.

INFORMATION

citizensdesignbureau.net

manchesterjewishmuseum.com

Architecture is one of those professions that can often become a family affair. Gottfried Böhm is not only the son of an architect, he is also the grandson, the husband and the father of architects. Since the early days of his career, more than 60 years ago, Böhm has been known for his original work, which, in 1986, earned him the Pritzker Prize. The Pilgrimage Church in Neviges, Germany, perfectly characterises his style – and is nothing like any church you could imagine.

Gottfried Böhm's life and career

Born in 1920, the son of acclaimed architect Dominicus Böhm, Gottfried Böhm began his career combining architecture and sculpture at the Technical University Munich and the Academy of Fine Arts. A few years as an assistant architect in the family business were followed by a brief period of work in the US, where he met Mies van der Rohe and Waiter Gropius. He took over the Böhm architecture studio in Koln after his father's death in 1955, kick-starting a long and impressive career, influenced by his father's designs as well as Bauhaus principles. His finished works include more than 40 churches, from Taiwan to Brazil.

The Pilgrimage Church

The Pilgrimage Church project began as a competition-winning entry in 1964, in response to the Catholic archdiocese of Koln's call for a church in Neviges, a small town about half an hour outside the city. Böhm's winning design ticked all the boxes, providing both the space and atmosphere for religious functions – it offers seating for 800 and standing room for 2,200 in a truly spectacular building – without any obvious recourse to traditional religious symbolism. 

The church was completed in May 1968 and instantly became a landmark in the town. Taking advantage of a row of pilgrims' houses and the church's position at the top of a slope, Böhm created a processional way leading up the hill, into the church's open courtyard and inside, ending at the altar and the pilgrimage's religious climax.

The building's voluminous composition – a constellation of protruding angular polygons with a roof of folded concrete plates – reflects Böhm's experience as a sculptor (he works in clay; sculpting a series of models until reaching the fin a l shape). As irregular as it can be on the outside, the church is equally impressive from within, dominated by strong geometry, an awe-inspiring interior height and spatial complexity around the main hall. The building's plasticity, accentuated by the roughness of materials and the play of light on both the sharp, free-shaped volumes and through the colourful windows, sets it apart fro m the work of Böhm's contemporaries. The church's fragmented volumes elegantly break up its huge bulk and give it a unique form that's hard to imitate – and to categorise.

Modernist principles

Some modernist principles can be identified in the design; Böhm shows Bauhaus ethics – austerity, honesty and an expression of his own time – in his use of materials, the layout and the technology. Still, that doesn't make him a modernist. He rejects labels, although he has been described as both expressionist and post-Bauhaus. He prefers, he says, to be ‘nothing in particular', to shift freely from style to style, from the simple to the complex, experimenting with form and material, utilising steel, glass, brick and concrete to suit each commission.

The Neviges church's revolutionary shape is the antithesis of everything Böhm is against: imitation of historic styles, over-designing and extreme minimalism. His design philosophy veers towards a human yet experimental approach: 'Anyone who does not have the strength to sin will not necessarily be a saint or a good architect – more likely a bore.'

A Pritzker Prize winner

The church is a true icon, very much of its time, and it brought Böhm many more commissions. Today, in his late eighties, he should be content; with the Pritzker Prize and worldwide critical acclaim in his pocket, and having built and taught for more than half a century, he has already left a rich architectural legacy - in more ways than one. Three of his four sons have become architects (the fourth is a painter). But Böhm continues to design nearly every day, either alone or with his sons. And, far from basking in his past glory, he is ever in the present. 'My favourite piece of work,' he reflects, 'is always the one in progress and under construction.'

A version of this article first appeared in issue 189 of Wallpaper* (June/July 2007)

With the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale launch approaching, we catch up with author and architect Shahed Saleem, one of the curators at the Applied Arts Pavilion Special Project, a collaboration between La Biennale di Venezia and London's Victoria & Albert Museum. The project, which will be part of the Arsenale displays, is titled ‘Three British Mosques', and looks into ‘contemporary multiculturalism through three adapted mosque spaces in London'. Our discussion spans from religious spaces to visitor experience at the display, which is set to open on 22 May in Venice.

W*: Tell us about this year's special V&A project at the biennale. What attracted you to explore this particular theme?

Shahed Saleem: I've been studying and designing mosques in Britain for over a decade, so when the V&A approached me to develop my work into an exhibition for the biennale, it seemed a meaningful response to this year’s theme of ‘How will we live together?’, because it is about how different cultures and communities can coexist side by side.

W*: How did you choose your three case studies?

SS: Mosques in Britain are mostly created through the adaptation of existing buildings, and these three case studies exemplify this.

The house-mosque is the simplest form of mosque, where domestic space is altered to become religious, and this is vividly illustrated in the Harrow Mosque. Many of the earliest mosques were made from houses, as they were the easiest type of building to acquire. Historically, many other minority religious communities in Britain created their first places of worship from house conversions, such as Nonconformists and Jews a hundred years previously. So the house mosque is a continuation of this tradition. 

Brick Lane Mosque represents the re-use of a former religious building. Again, many mosques have been made in this way, as religious space lends itself to easy re-use for Muslim worship. Brick Lane Mosque has a unique religious history: it was built as a Protestant Church, was then a Methodist chapel, followed by a synagogue, before it became a mosque. It shows how religious uses can layer themselves into one architectural space.

Old Kent Road Mosque was a former pub. It shows how the existing decoration and features of the pub have been adapted to become part of the mosque language. This combination of aesthetics and styles is a feature of adapted mosque buildings, where a new Islamic visual language emerges through the hybridisation of cultural references. 

W*: What attracts you to an adapted mosque structure like your case studies? What excites you in this type of mosque?

SS: These buildings are mostly self-designed, and in many cases self-built by the community who have established them. The design decisions are often rooted in the memories and visual culture of these communities. The design process is often ad hoc and collaborative, so it's a very democratic process with decisions made as the work progresses. The needs of the mosque are also continuously changing as the community grows and evolves. So this type of architecture is quite organic and improvised, and highly responsive to the needs and emotions of the community that uses it. I find this very exciting as it throws up new and unexpected design juxtapositions, and new symbolic and architectural meanings.

W*: Assuming adapted mosques are not unique to the UK, are there any international examples that really stand out to you?

SS: Adapted mosques are characteristic of the Muslim diaspora in Western countries, so you see them as the main mosque typology across northern Europe and the US. I find that some of the most striking are in former religious buildings or large spaces. One that stands out in my mind is the Fatih Mosque in Amsterdam, set in an imposing and elegant brick former Catholic church dating from the 1920s.

W*: What would you like the visitor to take away from the exhibition?

SS: I'd like the visitor to feel that they have gained a familiarity with the mosque and have physically engaged with these buildings. Through this I hope that people can further appreciate the inventiveness and richness of the architectural and aesthetic decisions that the mosque congregations have made in the creation of these unique places of worship. 

INFORMATION

‘Three British Mosques’, Sale d’Armi A, Arsenale, 22 May – 21 November 2021

The new Babyn Yar Synagogue has just been inaugurated in Ukraine. Designed by Switzerland-based architect Manuel Herz and part of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Foundation initiative, this innovative and powerful building not only serves as a temple, helping to re-establish the current, local Jewish community, but also acts as a reminder of the site's history. Herz drew on both elements for his design and created a striking, moveable structure that references the notion of a book – a central feature in the Jewish religious service. 

Babyn Yar, a wooded area west of Kyiv, was the tragic site of one of the worst massacres of the Second World War. In 1941, German troops shot and killed approximately 35,000 Jewish people there in the space of two days. A further 100,000 people met the same fate in Babyn Yar in the coming months. The landscape of the area has since changed, from forest to city park. This memorial is an important reminder of the events that took place there in the 1940s. 

The idea of the book being an important tool, symbol and source of knowledge within the Jewish religion was mixed with a sense of playfulness and the concept of the pop-up book, says the architect. As a result, the Babyn Yar Synagogue mechanically moves to open (an architectural approach Herz has experimented with before), becoming a generous, sheltered space; then it can close, into a flat, vertical form approximately 8m wide and 11m high. 

‘The pop-up book is a magic book that unfolds into three dimensions,' says Herz. ‘From a flat object, when we open it, new worlds unfold that we could not imagine before. In a sense, the pop-up book can act as a metaphor for the synagogue. Furthermore, the pop-up book triggers fascination: no one can resist the temptation of opening up these books of wonders, and exploring them. This quality of a “cabinet of wonder” and a new universe that unfolds is what I wanted to create in the location of Babyn Yar.'

The Babyn Yar Synagogue sits on a wooden platform, so as not to have deep foundations that disturb the natural context. The structure is made using a wooden and steel framework. The interior is decorated with symbols and iconography related to the Jewish faith and previous synagogues on site, which have since been destroyed. The wood is old oak, sourced from within the country, thus keeping a sense of place, history and patina to the forefront.

Meanwhile, the operation of the structure is as important as its function. ‘The building is manually opened, and then unfolds into the three-dimensional space of the synagogue,' says Herz. ‘The opening process is a collective ritual, performed by the congregation, as a manual and physical task, intentionally without the support of a motor. The unfolding space, with the bimah (reading platform for the Torah) in the centre, with its benches and balcony, is this new universe that has opened by reading the book together.'

INFORMATION

manuelherz.com

WINNER

Temple of Steps, Andhra Pradesh, India

Pictured top, Mumbai-based architect Sameep Padora was commissioned to create this temple for the residents of a number of villages around Nandyal in India’s Andhra Pradesh. The architect’s aim was to try to connect ‘the socio-cultural expectations of a temple with the ecological framework and dynamics of and around the site’. A nearby canal, previously used to irrigate the surrounding cotton and chilli fields, was dried up, so the architect went to work bringing water back into the landscape, flowing from the ground through neighbouring limestone quarries to form a pond. The temple’s volumes were imagined as a traditional ghat; a flight of steps leading down to a waterbody. This is a nod to the country’s particular historical typology, found for example in the city of Benares. India’s rich cultural heritage was a key source of inspiration for Padora in more ways than one; he also drew on a Tirupati 10th-century temple to plan his design that combines water and manmade structures. The building is made using black limestone slabs, profiled to form the steps and the roof. The structure incorporates soil and planting to help with cooling, to negotiate the region’s intense heat.

sp-arc.net

KEY FEATURES: water, historical references, stone architecture, planted architecture 
ARCHITECT’S PREVIOUS WORK: school library, Kopargaon, India; Lattice House, Jammu, India; Shiv Temple, Wadeshwar, Maharashtra, India 

SHORTLIST

MEETT, Toulouse, France

OMA’s MEETT Exhibition and Convention Centre in Toulouse links the city and the countryside; an industrial part of town and the agricultural landscape to the north; and through its function as an expo site, Toulouse and the rest of the world. Located to the city’s north, in its new ‘innovation zone’, the complex is planned around three main volumes, created in parallel to each other: a row of modular exhibition halls; a convention centre and multifunction event hall; and a reception area, including a silo car park for some 3,000 cars. The last is placed at the centre of the composition, leading visitors to the volumes flanking it and their respective functions. Seen as an ‘extrovert’ structure by its creators – a team led by OMA partners Chris van Duijn, Ellen van Loon and Rem Koolhaas – MEETT is ‘not an architectural intervention, but an urban machine. Both monumental in its scale and subtle in its overall impact, it will be a new gateway to Toulouse.’ French practices PPA Architectures and Taillandier Architectes Associés were associated designers. The structure has a fairly limited colour and material palette, alluding to a functional, pared down approach that is simple – yet carefully thought out – and easy to navigate. A series of black boxes, white-coloured steel and a polycarbonate skin make up the exhibition halls. Inside, vast, flexible, impressive spaces with a utilitarian feel are filled with natural light.

oma.eu

KEY FEATURES: urban campus, functionality, pared down aesthetic, polycarbonate skin 
ARCHITECTS’ PREVIOUS WORK: Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia; CCTV Tower, Beijing, China

He Art Museum, Shunde, China

Southern China’s traditional distinctive round buildings reflect the ancient belief that the sky is round and divine, and the Earth is square. Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando has reinterpreted this vernacular and the region’s famed waterside architecture for the new contemporary He Art Museum (HEM) in Shunde. The founder, He Jianfeng, who owns industrial investment group Infore, one of the region’s most successful businesses, hopes the museum’s striking architecture, Western works of art, and focus on southern China’s Lingnan culture will spark serious interest in culture and the arts. The entrance to the 16,000 sq m spiral-shaped pavilion, situated adjacent to Infore’s headquarters and plaza in the central business district, is by a path that crosses the pond encircling the museum. Inside, a monumental central skywell and floor-to-ceiling windows with aluminium alloy louvres flood the interior with daylight. An imposing pair of double-helix staircases in Ando’s signature smooth silvery-grey concrete create a dramatic Guggenheim-esque feel emphasised by the slightly cantilevered ascending four-storeys. There is a square ground-floor gallery, bookstore and café, and circular exhibition spaces above.

tadao-ando.com

KEY FEATURES: circular shape, concrete architecture, traditional vernacular references
ARCHITECT’S PREVIOUS WORK: Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy; Church of the Light, Osaka, Japan; Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum, Naoshima, Japan

Town House, Kingston, UK

Community was a key factor in the design decisions of RIBA Gold Medal-winning Grafton Architects, which won the commission to create Town House, a structure to combine a library and dance studios for Kingston University under a single roof. Stepping inside, the architects’ intention becomes instantly apparent through the sheer openness of the building – both physical and symbolic. There are no barriers towards the street, so anybody can walk in and stroll around the library or get a coffee at the canteen. The interior is composed of large, interconnected halls and double- and triple-height spaces, adding a sculptural touch. Nothing seems hidden away, although clever niches were created for privacy. The street-facing colonnade and a continuation of the floor material from the outside in are designed to encourage people to step inside. For a building that is primarily made out of concrete – constructed by the multi-award-winning contractor Willmott Dixon using prefabricated elements – the whole feels extraordinarily light. This sense is increased by large openings throughout and the elegant but hardwearing, everyday materials, such as wood, which help create a sophisticated but comfortable atmosphere, entirely fit for purpose. At the building’s heart sits an auditorium. Partitions can be drawn back to allow natural light to pour in, through the glass expanses of the façade. The building has achieved a BREEAM Excellent rating for sustainability. Roof gardens allow the use of brown roof technology to absorb water and to enhance biodiversity.

graftonarchitects.ie

KEY FEATURES: prefabricated concrete elements, sense of light and space, high sustainability rating, roof gardens 
ARCHITECTS’ PREVIOUS WORK: Universita Luigi Bocconi School of Economics; Milan, Italy; Venice Architecture Biennale 2018; Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), Lima, Peru

US Olympic & Paralympic Museum, Colorado, USA

Conceived to pay tribute to the Olympic and Paralympic movements in America, the latest Diller Scofidio + Renfro design opened in summer 2020 in Southwest Downtown, Colorado Springs. The US Olympic & Paralympic Museum is a striking piece of architecture defined by a soaring roof, clad in aluminium scales, that sweeps and folds impressively against its Rocky Mountains backdrop and glistens in the extraordinary local sunlight. Even with its commanding presence and picturesque setting, the architects say they have placed ‘Team USA athletes at the centre of the experience’. The building features 20,000 sq ft of galleries, a state-of-the-art theatre, event space and café, all celebrating the athletes’ ‘energy and grace’ and the much-loved international event’s values. The architect and client team also proudly state that this cultural offering is ‘amongst the most accessible museums in the world’, as DS+R paid special attention to this in the design, ensuring all areas and events are equally accessible to people of all abilities – and they all share a common path through the building. While the impressive façade consists of over 9,000 unique folded anodised diamond-shaped aluminium panels, inside, a crisp, white colour palette creates a fitting context for rotating shows and various displays. A terraced, covered plaza sits at the heart of the complex, leading to exhibition halls and café area.

dsrny.com 

KEY FEATURES: a roof clad with aluminium scales, accessibility, reflective volumes, irregular shapes 
ARCHITECTS’ PREVIOUS WORK: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, USA; The Broad, Los Angeles, USA; High Line, New York, USA

SEE MORE FROM WALLPAPER* DESIGN AWARDS 2021

If you ask Tszwai So, London-based architect and one half of boutique studio Spheron, to talk about his work, it won't take long before the discussion turns to the subject of emotion. It is an area that So, who set up Spheron in 2011 with Samuel Bentil-Mensah (the technical director to So's creative lead) feels passionate about. 

‘I cannot agree more with the remark Malcolm Gladwell once made, when he was addressing an audience from the real estate industry, that ‘we very often gloss over the emotional and psychological implications of what you are doing (creating the built environment), but the built environment matters not just on some kind of practical or economic or aesthetic level, but it matters in the way that is intimate to the way people navigate their own lives…’, he explains. ‘Emotional intelligence is perhaps too often disregarded in architectural training in favour of abstract intellectual reasoning, a design that would win architects over does not necessarily move people’s hearts.'

Spheron, a five-people-strong outfit seeks to address this. The studio's work ranges from housing to commercial, cultural and religious projects, and spans the small and the larger scale. They have constructed London’s only wooden church for the Belarusian diaspora community – a 2017 completion they consider a breakthrough one for the practice. They are currently working on residential work and building the new headquarters for the world’s oldest specialist in vintage Rolls Royce and Bentley cars.

The common thread in all is a sensitive approach that places the understanding – both through logic and emotion – of the context of each commission, to result in a design that is ‘emotionally engaging.' This, explains So, is more about nuances and complexities in all levels within the conceptual solution, rather than the design per se.

One of their most recent works is the design for EU’s first ever Pan-European Memorial for ‘all victims of 20th century Totalitarianism'. Called An Echo in Time, it was conceived around the letters written by those affected to their loved ones, drawing on their powerful emotional impact. The scheme, the result of an open competition, is set to be built at the Jean Rey Square in Brussels. The carefully selected letters will be enlarged and permanently embedded within new paving slabs, encouraging passers-by to read them. 

The studio's explorations in emotional life, notions of collective memory and human relationships are key to each and every undertaking, combined with appropriate research and a strong site specific approach tailored to their clients – ‘I always try to resist any preconceived ideas and to repress my ego at the beginning of each project,' says So. 

‘Our body of work is primarily concerned with the subjective connection between human emotions and the built environment, and a lot of this relationship is linked to memory and identity,' he adds. ‘We believe that fundamental architectural drivers, function and sustainability, must be joined by emotion. This is not just an appeal to aesthetics, which has been hijacked in the past by utilitarianism and commercial expediency. We therefore avoid a signature style of recurring visual attributes, instead approaching the task of design with a view to instilling buildings with meaning, with human resonance.'

An active member of the architecture community beyond building, So is also involved in filmmaking, curatorship, teaching and writing about architecture. Most recently he teamed up with architectural critic and author Herbert Wright to submit a proposal for the theme and curation of the 2022 Talin Architecture Biennale – they ended up among the five shortlisted proposals.

‘We call ourselves the ‘Emotionalists’, we believe in creating art and architecture based on the supremacy of human emotions, responding directly to the potentially existential challenge of digitalisation,' says the architect. The Tallinn proposal may not have been selected as the winner, but So's quest to expand on themes of home, human emotion and the built environment continues in an upcoming film: E-motion-Al City. Made in collaboration with Hong Kong conglomerate the Chinachem Group, the art film is planned to debut at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2021.

INFORMATION

spheronarchitects.co.uk

A floating church has moored in East London. The work of locally-based architecture studio Denizen Works, this innovative project brings together architecture and boat building, religious, community spaces and practice, and contemporary design. 

The project was spearheaded by the Diocese of London for the St Columba East London community, and has been created in close collaboration with Turks Shipyard and naval architect Tony Tucker. Now floating on the River Lee Navigation alongside Here East at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the scheme aims to become a beacon for local communities and a space to, not just pray, but also meet, gather and plan a range of activities in. As well as serving as a space for a church, the barge can accommodate, for example, parent and toddler groups, pilates classes and art classes, interfaith celebrations, lunch and supper clubs, live music, employment training, support workshops and counselling.

‘We wanted to develop a design which would transform in shape to be delightful and surprising to answer the client brief to create a ‘conspicuous presence’ on the towpaths of London,' explains Denizen Works director Andrew Ingham. ‘Like all of our projects, we looked widely for inspiration and the trigger often comes from unexpected places. We drew inspiration from architecture that transforms as well as other spaces, including the classic VW camper van. The notion of the reconfiguration of spatial experience through mechanics felt right but we also wanted it to link back more directly to ecclesiastical heritage and through our research of church buildings through the ages we came across some beautiful woodprints of organ bellows. We were particularly taken with the sculptural form of these bellows and we wanted our roof to share this formal quality whilst establishing a subtle poetic link to traditional churches.'

Architecturally, the design's centrepiece is its unique, organ bellow-inspired kinetic roof. Created in translucent sailcloth, lined with LED lights and powered by hydraulic rams, it can expand and contract and adapt to the space's needs. It can be easily operated by the touch of a button. 

‘Mobile architecture, particularly on boats, has a rich history and we looked at Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo and more directly Kahn’s floating theatre, which like the church transforms in use,' says Denizen Works director Murray Kerr. ‘Our approach to the interior was to create a gallery space, free from religious symbolism, so that it would be welcoming to all, to align with the wider community uses planned for the boat. There are subtle references in the plan to elements of church architecture including the nave and aisles, but for the most part we have allowed the boat to be a boat within which we have inserted a beautiful room.'

Upon entering, midship, one side - the front - contains the main hall for about 40-60 people (depending on the configuration and circumstances) with its plywood walls, green linoleum floor and round skylight; while services, such as kitchen and bathrooms are located on the opposite end of the barge. Flexible, custom made furniture, has been delivered by local design company Plyco. 

Named Genesis, after the first book of the Bible, the project ‘alludes to the narrative of creation,' explains the team behind it, which includes Rev Dave Pilkington, who will lead the new church's activities. ‘Having an amazing space, that is beautiful, peaceful and offers hospitality in an unusual place in a creative and surprising way tells a similar story,' he adds. ‘It’s good news and it is found where people might not expect to find it. That is disruptive in a gentle way, it can challenge people's view of what Church can be and hopefully at least opens them to have a conversation about life and spirituality. It is also an intimate space which does not overwhelm or make you feel small and insignificant. I hope it becomes a place where people can feel like they have a seat at the table, a place where they can belong, as they get to know other people.'

The structure is set to remain on this spot for three to five years, reaching out and supporting communities living around the East London canal.

INFORMATION

denizenworks.com

Although the UK’s golden age of modernist ecclesiastical design has long since passed, this new project by Feilden Fowles dovetails modern design into a site with 900 years of history without compromising the old or watering down the new. The project transforms access to Carlisle Cathedral’s Grade I-listed medieval Fratry – a building originally built as a dining hall for the monks living in the Cathedral Priory.

Built in the 1500s and altered in the centuries that followed, the red sandstone building has served as a kitchen, church, weapons store, chapter house, brewery and library, amongst other things. Recognising that the modern era had left the space underused, the Cathedral has spent the best part of 15 years working out a way of bringing the building back into the heart of the community.

Appointed six years ago, Feilden Fowles offered the solution to build a new entrance pavilion, creating additional space and making the entire site more useable and welcoming. The pavilion is a modest single-storey structure finished in precisely cut Dumfries red sandstone and defined by its run of elegant neo-Gothic arches. Set at 90 degrees to the medieval structure, it contains a café, fully adaptable space as well as a new entrance to both the Fratry and the Undercroft.

A bronze link structure, designed with Structure Workshop, contains steps and a lift, creating a light filled transition from new to old. The pavilion uses modern methods like 3D modelling and CNC-cut stone, as well as simple, hard-wearing materials like timber, bronze, polished concrete, stone and lime plaster. A new courtyard cements the feeling of unity with the cathedral, creating a new public space supported by the new café and education facilities.

Feilden Fowles has had to wind its way through public consultations, rounds of fundraising and the close involvement of specialists at every stage. The result is a credit to the team’s tenacity, as well as a reminder that great architecture is a long game. The project also involved reinstating lost or altered features, as well as the application of new stone carvings, and creates not only a new public space for Carlisle, but a fine example of contemporary design in a historic context.

The Gothic forms are treated with geometric precision and the new building never attempts to overpower its surroundings. Fergus Feilden and Edmund Fowles founded their practice in London in 2009 and quickly garnered attention for their work in the arts and education sectors. Currently assisting with the revitalization of the landscaping around London’s Natural History Museum, they are also working on major projects at both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. §

INFORMATION

carlislecathedral.org

feildenfowles.co.uk

Following over a year of closure for restoration works, the Rothko Chapel in Houston has now reopened to the public. The well known sacred space was dedicated in 1971 and features 14 monumental Mark Rothko canvases as per the original vision of the artist and John and Dominique de Menil, the Chapel’s founders.

The project is just the first phase of Opening Spaces, a $30-million master plan for its campus, conceived by New York-based firm, Architecture Research Office. The firm also oversaw the structure's restoration. 

During this process, the building's skylight, lighting design and entryway were reconfigured to be better aligned with the project's original aim so that visitors can freely interact with the artworks. The lighting adjustments were made by specialist design firm George Sexton Associates. Changes have included removing obstructions in order to allow natural light in the open plan interior.

Complementing the chapel, this September also saw the opening of the Suzanne Deal Booth Welcome House, a new built pavilion, which sits immediately to the north of the Chapel. This addition serves as a gathering point for the monument, as well as a formal welcoming space for groups and guided tours and an area for interactive educational opportunities. It also includes a gift shop and bookstore.

The surrounding landscape was redesigned by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, providing ample and serene, green space. A sculpture, Broken Obelisk by Barnett Newman, also sits on the grounds, dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1971 – the same year as the Chapel’s founding. 

This highlights the chapel's commitment to human rights and social justice. The structure has always served as an open spiritual space for both solitude and gathering, dedicated to ‘increased opportunities for spiritual growth and dialogue,' says the institution - welcoming to all, regardless of faith, spiritual or religious background.

INFORMATION

rothkochapel.org

In the small town of Bansberia in West Bengal, architect Abin Chaudhuri has replaced the 100-year-old Narayantala Thakurdalan temple – much-loved but awkward and unremarkable as a structure – with a modern upgrade. Chaudhuri, founder of Abin Design Studio, grew up in Bansberia. Now based in Kolkata, 55km away, he is well-versed in the local culture that orients around religion and football. He had attended the Narayantala Thakurdalan since childhood, joyfully participating in religious celebrations, yet also seeing how people spilled out into the street causing accidents and traffic jams, due to its location on a busy corner.

He knew he could design a better temple for his community. He also knew that it wasn’t the crumbling brick and plaster construction that made the place special. ‘Thakurdalan’ translates as ‘permanent covered podium’ in Bengali. Religious idols are placed inside the temple twice a year during celebrations, but for the most part, it is visited for daily prayers and meditation.

‘As a child, I saw that even when there was no idol, people left their shoes outside. They treated it as a sacred space, but it was not about the structure, it was about belief,’ says Chaudhuri. So instead of designing the new Narayantala Thakurdalan as a ‘temple’, he was guided purely by context and function. The aim was to protect this sacred space.

His design is a carefully tailored response to the community and their activities. While much smaller than the original temple, at 71 sq m with a capacity of 40 people, it offers much more useful space. The column-free interior and wider glass-and-steel door allows for an easy flow of people in and out, and now during festivities, they spill out into a courtyard with a new concrete bench, instead of onto the street.

The low-maintenance structure was designed and completed within six months. While simple, it is also an expression of tradition and craft, as seen in the chunky lattice-work façade that nods to traditional Indian architecture. The patchwork of rectangular concrete modules was pre-cast at the Adisaptagram Workshop, set up by Abin Design Studio to invest in education and employment for local craftsmen, and ensuring the best craft and skills for his projects.

With Chaudhuri now working on a clubhouse for local footballers and a town hall, the new Narayantala Thakurdalan is part of a string of sensitive architecture projects contributing to place-making in Bansberia.

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Wallpaper* (W*257). Download the issue here

The above film on Abin Design Studio's Urban Temple project in India, created by Edmund Sumner, features music by Craig Pruess: ‘Om Nama Shivaya' from the album ‘Sacred Chants of Shiva' by Singers of the Art of Living and Craig Pruess c 2000 by Heaven on Earth Music Limited

INFORMATION

abindesignstudio.com

Sydney’s Candalepas Associates has brought a slice of brutalism to the city’s Punchbowl suburb with an orthogonal new mosque. The concrete structure provides a new home for the Australian Islamic Mission, and its various educative and community facilities can host up to 300 worshippers at once.

The mosque forms the first of a two-part project for the local Islamic community. The second stage of the plan will see the development of new community buildings that will orbit the place of worship, in turn bringing the local faith closer together. Candalepas Associates was resultantly driven to give the mosque a unique architectural vernacular, so to help it stand separate and distinct from its future sibling spaces.

The development is arranged around a quadrangle that forms two interconnected yet distinctly isolated courtyards. The two open spaces provide ample space for the mosque’s primary daytime functions, and grant privacy to community members making use of the facilities inside. The second of the two, located further towards the centre of the development, can be opened up to the building’s interior, catering to larger events and festivals across the year.

Heading inside, natural light forms a central element of the core prayer space. The vaulted ceiling features a funnel-like skylight that looks upwards, out of the concrete. The feature rises to a second tier of rounded wooden rings, climbing in gradually constricting waves to reveal a circular orifice above.

The natural light provided by this centrepiece is supplemented across the interior. A two-tiered transparent wooden façade filters in light above the main entrance. Additionally, over 100 muqarnas – the archetypal patterned motif of Islamic architecture – all feature 30mm diameter holes that welcome in slim rays of sunlight. This combination produces an interior lighting experience that evolves as the day’s prayer services follow one another.

Elsewhere, a splayed off-form wall juts from the mosque’s main entry doors, breaking the visual language and concurrently positioning worshippers towards the city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Muhammad.

INFORMATION

candalepas.com.au

Working with site constraints and demanding plots is part of every London architect's daily life; what with (understandably) strict local planning laws and increasing urban density, combined with a rich historical fabric that doesn't leave a lot of room for manoeuvre, building design is no mean feat in the British capital. Yet this doesn't stop London's industrious architects from creating the unexpected, pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Bridging old and new through a cohesive and eye-catching design, a freshly extended chapel for the International Presbyterian Church Ealing (IPC) is the perfect example. 

The new design wraps around an existing Grade II listed chapel in West London's Drayton Green. IPC approached Camden based architecture practice Piercy & Co for a brand new space for their congregation – flexible spaces and generous volumes that would be both sensitive to the existing historical building on site and provide a contextual, architecturally interesting design were equally important. And while the church wasn't planning to be renting spaces out for profit, some of their areas might end up being used by the local community on occasion, so this needed to be taken into account too.

Expanding the interior dramatically, both in terms of size and visual impact, the addition creates room for some 250 people, in a warm and light-filled space. The origami-style pleated top both references the area's pitched roofs but also through its abstract form brings a contemporary, sharp feel to the whole through its crisp angles and folds. 

‘The soaring ceilings and vaulted spaces of traditional church architecture offered a key reference point for the church’s form', explain the architects. The roof's dynamic geometries were created with steel framing and cross laminated timber, in pre-fabricated panels (for speed in construction). The folds also serve a symbolic role. ‘As the roof rises towards the front of the site, the folds peak in an abstracted spire, signalling the building’s ecclesiastical function', says practice head Stuart Piercy. 

‘We were very interested in the symbolic form of a church, both the internal experience and the external civic expression of the form', continues Piercy. ‘We rarely get the chance to explore this kind of formal expression in our more commercial projects. The church believed in doing something that clearly expressed its spiritual nature inside and out and the challenge was how to protect this ideal with limited resources and negotiating a complex build.'

Attention to detail, immaculate, streamlined design and a sensitive material selection – an approach that is a Piercy signature – work towards an impressive whole. The building also marks Piercy & Co's very first civic building; a great addition to the practice's gem-filled portfolio of residential and office work. It is with good reason then that this project has a special place in Piercy's heart. ‘There are so few opportunities to create new churches, which is very sad as it is such a rewarding typology to be involved with', he adds.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the Piercy & Co website

Modern post-war churches arose out of a mixture of necessity – war-ravaged Europe had lost countless places of worship – and ecumenical reform. The Vatican II council of the early 1960s resulted in a wholesale revision of the ecclesiastical designer’s approach to the physical form and layout of churches, with the traditional cruciform layout abandoned in favour of placing the altar at the heart of the structure. Switzerland might not have suffered any major war damage, but the country’s Church was at the forefront of this modernising movement. From the late 1950s to the 1970s, the country built some of the most avant-garde churches in Europe.

Concrete was the material of choice. In fact, the ongoing Swiss penchant for béton brut has turned this most controversial of materials into something of a national device, continuously developed into the modern era by each new generation of architects. It helps, of course, that one of the most iconoclastic architects of the 20th century was Swiss, a man who dedicated his career to re-shaping the global perception of architectural form.

Then, as now, Le Corbusier was hugely influential. Aside from his buildings, his legacy to his mother country was a fiercely ambitious coterie of intellectual architects who saw the development of his aesthetic and architectural theories as an essential part of their practice. Corb might have been the generator, but his admirers were keen to push the boundaries even further.

Walter Maria Förderer, born in 1928, was at the forefront of the generation of Swiss architects to practise in the late 1940s and 1950s. He began his career as a sculptor, and his use of concrete evolved from his preference for the hands-on contact with a material. By the time he was in his forties, Förderer had become an inspiration to Swiss architects, spawning a fashion for expressive concrete schemes which threatened to usurp even Le Corbusier’s achievements in the field.

Förderer was a concrete man through and through

While works by architects such as Otto Glaus and Ernst Gisel retained a kernel of functionalism – still very much evident in contemporary Swiss architecture – Förderer’s work was superficially hard-edged, but self-consciously formalist, even decorative and playful, in its manipulation of space. Staircases ‘hung’ in voids, boxed forms featured deep-set windows and quirky extrusions, while strange totemic objects rose up in defiance of modernism’s rejection of the eccentric.

In the early 1960s, along with Rolf G Otto and Hans Zwimpfer, Förderer designed the Brunnmatt-Schulhaus in Basel, an academic campus of angular concrete towers – a perverse re-imagining of the Gothic style. While Le Corbusier’s later works emphasised the combination of organic forms with rigid concrete abstraction, Förderer and his partners eschewed flowing space for a three-dimensional grid, layering functions on top of one another and reflecting the jumble with stacked concrete cubes.

Förderer was also a published theorist, who used his treatises to expound upon the theory that a strictly functionalist approach resulted in inflexible and static architecture. Yet while his contemporaries seized upon the potential of ephemeral buildings constructed from industrial materials, scaffolding and other new technologies, Förderer was a concrete man through and through. His flexibility was to be achieved through scale, creating almost mega-structural complexes that could accommodate a variety of users.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his eight churches completed during the 1960s in Switzerland and Germany. The church centre at Hérémence, a small Swiss town nestled on a steeply sloping site, includes the church of St Nicholas, plus meeting rooms and accommodation. The complex resembles the hyper-dense three-dimensional assemblages created by Kurt Schwitters, rather than the flat, mannered abstraction of Le Corbusier’s purist paintings.

At Hérémence, the pulpit, cross and altar sprout from the floors and walls, with the jagged forms of the nave apparently defined by absence, as if carved from a vast block of poured concrete. Förderer worked with Otto and Zwimpfer on this darkly expressionistic project, but other works were done alone, including the churches at Bettlach and Lichtenstein.

As the design for St Nicholas was being finalised, Förderer was completing the Church of the Holy Cross in Chur. While St Nicholas is an outcrop of concrete strata, the Chur building is smaller, and squat and brooding, but no less imposing.

Spiritual architecture often shapes the aesthetic cutting edge. These churches demonstrate one man’s quest to translate the mysteries of faith into physical form. Beautifully made and well maintained, his churches are still at the heart of their communities, not brutal but beloved. 

A version of this article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Wallpaper* (W*121)

The spiritual architecture of Swiss architect Mario Botta is the subject of an exhibition at the Ringturm Exhibition Centre in Vienna. Building studies, drawings and photography are brought side by side to reach an understanding of how Botta conceptualises and designs religious experiences through the built environment.

Religious architecture is a typology that Botta has continued to return to. His very first architectural project was a chapel at the Bigorio Capuchin monastery in Ticino, Switzerland, built in 1966, and since then, he has completed 22 spiritual buildings over his 50 year career.

The geographical spread of Botta’s spiritual spaces is broad. His chapels can be found across Europe, in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland. The two vast cylinders and square base of his synagogue in Israel are made of red stone from the Italian Dolomites, while a Swiss timber ceiling lines and softens the interior. Soon his reach will be even wider, as three more of his religious buildings are currently under construction including a mosque in China near the Monogolia border, a Catholic church outside of Seoul, and an Orthodox community centre in Ukraine.

Mausoleum of President Patricio Aylwin Azócar, Gonzalo Mardones Arquitecto, Santiago, Chile

While each is unique, his religious buildings hold certain stylistic similarities. Botta plays with heaviness (and lightness) using materials to create experiences of contrast – forming finite and infinite sensations. Daylight and shadows are highly controlled, as well as the human pathway through the architecture, tempered by walls, transparency, paths and thresholds. The experience is a shifting journey between states of compression and expression. 

Botta’s religious buildings often appear like objects in the landscape, like geometric charms or symbols cut out of natural materials. In Seriate, Italy, his Church dedicated to Pope John XXIII (completed in 2004), resembles a sacred pattern or a detail of a relief carving – the building’s solidity is accentuated further still by its singular cladding material of red Verona marble. Completed in 2013, the Granatkapelle chapel in Zillertal, Austria, takes the dodecahedral form of the mineral granite after which it is named. Citing Le Corbusier, Kahn, Michelucci and Scarpa as references, Botta understands how the power of architecture can define a moment, and make a spiritual statement. 

INFORMATION

‘Mario Botta – Sacral Spaces’ is on view until 31 May 2019. For more information, see the Ringturm Exhibition Centre website

ADDRESS

Ringturm Exhibition Centre
Schottenring 30
1010 Vienna
Austria

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‘You’ve come to the right place for slowness,’ says John Pawson in the basement of his King’s Cross studio, from which comes the work that has given Pawson a global reputation as the pre-eminent supplier of architectural calm, be it for houses, hotels, offices, galleries, shops or even monasteries. Often characterised as minimalist, the Pawson aesthetic is actually one of considered reductivism, the removal of extraneous detail in favour of an all-enveloping simplicity. Sometimes this purity is juxtaposed with existing structure to accentuate its simplicity. Sometimes landscape is the foil.

The Casa delle Bottere combines the architect’s legendary asceticism with a full quota of cutting-edge low-energy technology. Pawson’s houses have always received more attention than his other works, largely because they seem to prescribe a very particular way of life. Yet as the architect himself gently points out, creating a domestic environment is always a collaboration with a client, an ongoing conversation that brings together their requirements with Pawson’s constantly refined visual sense.

‘They’re trusting you with something they really can’t envision,’ says Pawson, adding, ‘I understand the client’s point of view more and more as I get older. They’re all hugely successful and talented people, and they have their own point of view. And they’re in the business of testing you. You’re doing them a disservice if you give in.’

This house and chapel in Veneto is a case in point. Casa delle Bottere is being built for a family with a sizeable experience of commissioning architecture, meaning that ‘the client had a very realistic programme for design and construction’. With that established, Pawson explains that the building is always ‘very dependent on the client – that’s the whole point of this game. It’s all to do with trust and courage and patience.’

Together with associate architect Giuseppe Cangialosi, of Treviso-based MZC Architettura, Pawson and his project architect Ben Collins have carved a remarkable dwelling out of the Venetian landscape, with the Dolomites rising in the distance. Inspired by both the rough simplicity of local agricultural buildings and the classical purity of Veneto’s most famous architectural son, Andrea Palladio, the Casa is a strangely satisfying hybrid of vernacular pragmatism and rigorous geometry.

Set within the landscape, the single storey dwelling is placed above a large basement and courtyard. ‘This house had to reach AECB CarbonLite gold standard sustainability status, so it’s incredibly energy efficient,’ says Pawson. ‘All the materials are recycled, it’s triple-glazed, there are photovoltaic panels – it’s a sort of case study.’ Energy efficiency is of course, now integral to every architectural brief, but Pawson stresses that this particular house takes things further – to achieve gold standard, it must put out just five per cent of current average CO2 emissions for a dwelling. ‘When you start saving the energy lost from hot water going down a waste pipe, you’re into quite sophisticated areas,’ Pawson says. ‘The triple glazing, for example, requires custom-built sliding doors.’

Externally, the house is finished with marmorino slabs, a traditional material in the Veneto region (it was used extensively by Palladio in the numerous grand villas he constructed in and around Vicenza). The 30m-long rectangular form of the new house is capped with an asymmetric roof, clad with custom-made white concrete slabs and supported by slender columns. ‘As a result, every room has a different shaped roof,’ says the architect.

The main entrance is from below, where an excavated basement serves as car port and service area. There, the owners can park out of sight, then ascend to a double height entrance hall in the centre of the plot. To the west are the living areas, beneath the highest point of the roof, while bedrooms are off to the east. The deep eaves on the south façade provide shade from the sun and a terrace on which to eat and play – all rooms open up to the outdoors via those hefty glazed doors.

The roof also features an offset gable with a solitary window overlooking the entrance driveway and terminating the long axis that runs through the spine of the house. This cruciform plan references one of Palladio’s key architectural devices, running from the living area in the west to the master suite in the east, and north-south across the entrance hall at the house’s heart. The axis can be opened or closed off depending on requirements. All the bathrooms have rooflights and all public rooms have a dual aspect, while artificial lighting is discreetly concealed.

The landscaping has been designed by Pawson’s long-term collaborator Jonnie Bell, who has planted rows of oak trees that run with the contours to provide screening and shade. The chapel is designed as an object within this landscape, set apart from the main house and intended for family baptisms and private services. An unheated box with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, above which a concealed skylight allows natural light to filter down from behind the walls, it is deceptively simple, with Toscana Pietra limestone flooring and an altar and benches made from local oak.

‘It’s nice for us to do these spaces,’ says Pawson. ‘Churches have been a learning curve – Cistercians, for example, are the ultimate minimalists.’ The practice’s work on the Our Lady of Novy Dvur monastery in the Czech Republic, completed in 2004, won it widespread acclaim and more religious buildings are in the offering. 

An adaptation of a story originally featured in the October 2010 issue of Wallpaper* (W*139)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit John Pawson’s website and the MZC Architettura website

Architecture buffs might recognise the brutalist cathedral in Clifton, Bristol by its distinctive, irregular, elongated hexagonal floorplan. What many don’t know however, is that the iconic building has been suffering from water leakages for years, due to its large, striking lead roof not being entirely watertight. Enter architecture and heritage experts Purcell, who have just unveiled their careful repair work to the building’s historical fabric, rendering the cathedral fully watertight for the first time ever.

The structure, also known as Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of SS. Peter and Paul in Clifton, Bristol, was originally constructed between 1969-73 to a design by Ron Weeks of the Percy Thomas Partnership, and is a Grade II* listed monument.

Due to the building’s sensitive and historical nature, Purcell worked closely with all relevant parties and the Lead Sheet Association to ensure the greatest care is taken when carrying out the repair works. The latter was heavily involved because the pitched roof required the majority of the works – some 86 tons of replacement lead. It was the largest lead roofing project in Britain at the time of its creation.

Making a key architectural monument fully operational again, while safeguarding it for the future, Purcell also aimed to respect its characteristic original style and concrete aesthetic. ‘Our conviction was for the building to become watertight, and safe and open for use, but also not to lose any of its rigour and quality as a superb exponent of the late brutalist era’, says the company’s partner in Bristol, Clifford Martin. ‘The works have been undertaken with the intention to both repair and protect the building, and to magnify and celebrate its original design and detail.’

And there’s one more twist to this success story. A condition of the project’s funding was that it opened up parts of the building to the public that has previously been inaccessible, such as the gallery over the iconic baptistery, and a staircase that had previously been sealed off. This way, visitors can enjoy the structure both as a monument and for its religious services, in the best possible way.

See more cutting-edge religious architecture around the world

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Purcell

When she was nine, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota saw the burnt-out, soundless remains of her neighbour’s piano after a house fire. The image stayed with her. Now, it has inspired a haunting new work, rendered in her preferred medium, webs of twisted thread.

‘Beyond Time’ – an immersive installation spun from the flagstones to the rafters in the deconsecrated, 18th-century chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park – is divergent from Shiota’s previous works, in that it uses pure, white thread instead of the gothic reds and blacks she earlier favoured. Traditionally, white represents mourning in Japan, but for Shioto, it has a connection to ‘eternity’; her belief that entering into death is just another phase of being.

Exterior of the Chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. © The artist and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018. Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Photography: © Jonty Wilde

Emitting from a cast iron piano in the centre of the space, like a visual manifestation of sound, a complexity of white threads entangle hundreds of sheets of paper. From afar, it’s a hurricane in a printworks. Look closely and you’ll see that each sheet is uniquely printed with writing and score.

We’re told some papers come from the booklet of Ezra Taylor’s memorial service which happened in the venue in the 1960s. Another set contains the chapel’s bell ringing instructions, and a third contains the dedication of the chapel organ (the wood from which has coincidentally been used by other artists with works at YSP).

It was the chapel’s absence of a musical instrument that first inspired Shiota to create the installation, and the silence of the space remains tangible. There’s rigidity in the unplayable black steel keys of the piano; a quietude from the visitors contemplatively milling, stillness in the papers that are snapshot-suspended, mid-flight.

This silence adds to the performative quality of the installation. Trained by Marina Abramović in Berlin, Shiota began her career as a performance artist, inspirations from which linger in the webs – a sensory explosion.

A scattering of additional works are concealed from first view in the matroneum and vestibule – bronze cast hands lovingly entwined together, portraits of dancing figures embellished with thread arabesques. Hidden like confessions to Shiota’s wider practice, they’re intriguing, but not wholly in sync with the charged webs that criss-cross through the chapel. Instead, they contextualise Shiota’s work, grounding the installation in her interest in memory, relationships, loss.

Embracing all who enter, ‘Beyond Time’ references the chapel’s rich history and years of human presence, dating back to 1744, alluding to the bells that were rung, the songs that were sung, and the lives that revolved around it. It also comments on the chapel’s deconsecration, filling the space floor-to-roof in agnostic ‘art’, there for its beauty and symbolism alone. Yet, like after a religious service, we leave peaceful, contemplative, refreshed.

INFORMATION

‘Chiharu Shioto: Beyond Time’ is on view until 2 September. For more information, visit the Yorkshire Sculpture Park website

ADDRESS

Yorkshire Sculpture Park
West Bretton
Wakefield WF4 4LG

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A run-down port city on the edge of Europe that has suffered from decades of industrial decline, and an iconic building designed by a world-famous architect at the peak of his career. The description may sound a lot like Bilbao, but where are the hordes of tourists and the booming economy?

The iconic building I’m referring to here is not by Frank Gehry but by Gio Ponti, the legendary Italian architect-designer best known for the Pirelli Tower in Milan and the ‘Superleggera’ chair, which he created for Cassina in 1957. Yet this is arguably the greatest work of his later years, and it deserves to be rescued from the obscurity into which it has gradually sunk since it was completed in 1970.

The city is Taranto, which sits beneath the heel of southern Italy. A major naval base, it has a remarkable history and a spectacular setting between a sweeping bay and the Mare Piccolo, an inland sea. Founded as a Spartan colony in the eighth century BC, it grew to become one of the biggest cities in pre-Roman Europe, but sadly, contemporary Taranto has seen its fortunes fade. Though it had a minor boom in the 19th century, in the 1930s Mussolini had a quarter of the ancient centre demolished to build a row of grim apartment blocks, and it was badly bombed in the Second World War. To add insult to injury, Europe’s biggest steelworks belches dust and dioxins into the air, giving Taranto the unenviable reputation of being one of the worst polluted cities on earth.

Back in the 1960s, though, a mood of optimism, and the rapid expansion of the so-called Città Nuova to the south east, convinced the local archbishop, Guglielmo Motolese, that Taranto needed a new cathedral to supplement the small 11th-century basilica in the old town. The choice of Gio Ponti as architect might seem unusually enlightened, but Ponti was a deeply religious man and had already designed several churches in Milan. Not surprisingly, he jumped at the chance of building a cathedral and, between 1964 and the start of construction in 1967, he developed what is arguably his most complex and original plan.

The design of the Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio, as it became known, was inspired by its maritime surroundings. In place of a central crossing tower, Ponti came up with the idea of a ‘sail’. A kind of belfry without bells, the full width of the nave and 40m high, it is built from two concrete walls just a metre apart, perforated with vertical slits and hexagonal openings, including what Ponti called a ‘door to the sky, opening onto the immensity and the mystery of space and time’. The west front follows this openwork idea, featuring a stripped-down version of a medieval screen, with Gothic arches replaced by triangular canopies. A stepped podium raises the cathedral above a piazza and a trinity of reflecting pools that symbolise the ocean, while sea-green floor tiles add an appropriately aqueous accent inside.

The interior is equally considered. Triple bronze doors lead to a galleried narthex and the wide, low nave, lit by a scattering of tiny hexagonal windows tucked between the V-shaped springers of the transverse vaults. Beneath the ‘sail’, where the crossing would normally be, the roof level rises dramatically, flooding the choir with light from a full-width window immediately above but hidden from the nave. Five steps higher than the nave, the choir is flanked by two side chapels with galleries above, enclosed by three levels of arcades, their reveals and soffits painted in various shades of green. Stepped seating rises behind the futuristic winged altar, which is flanked by two freestanding columns supporting spindly crosses that also read as anchors – another nautical touch.

Early photographs of the cathedral show it on the edge of the city, surrounded by fields and olive groves. Sadly, this bucolic setting was not to last. Though Ponti intended the building’s stark outlines to be softened by lush surrounding gardens, with the ‘sail’ and the freestanding arches that frame the side doors designed specifically to support climbing plants, these plans came to nothing. Today, this masterpiece of 20th-century architecture is a poignant sight. Though the interiors have been maintained fairly well, the exterior is disfigured by graffiti and desperately in need of a lick of paint. Those idyllic olive groves, meanwhile, were long ago buried beneath blocks of 1970s housing, which surround the cathedral on three sides, while the back overlooks a rubbish-strewn car park.

Sophie Bouilhet Dumas, Gio Ponti’s grand-niece and (with Olivier Gabet and Salvatore Licitra) co-curator of a major Ponti show coming up at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, believes it to be one of the architect’s greatest works. ‘Taranto Cathedral is the most accomplished expression of Ponti’s personal vision of a “pantheistic” religious art,’ she says. ‘It represents the achievement of an architectural dream of building an edifice merged with water, vegetation and air.’

In Bilbao, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum gave the city a new lease of life. Is it possible that a restoration of Ponti’s cathedral could do the same for Taranto? There are some promising signs. Late last year, a consortium that included ArcelorMittal offered £1.8bn for the city’s steelworks operator, in a deal that included a commitment to clean up the site and reduce emissions to environmentally acceptable levels. (The deal awaits a ruling from the European Commission.) Taranto has an ambitious new mayor, and there is pressure from local groups to improve the city’s image.

Admittedly, with a population of just 200,000 (greater Bilbao is over four times its size) and high unemployment, Taranto struggles to fund even basic services, never mind cultural icons. Yet the Guggenheim Bilbao was largely funded by the regional government, not the city. And surely the renovation of an architectural icon of European significance would be the perfect candidate for European funding? Watch this space – but, in the meantime, go and see.§

As originally featured in the June 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*231)

From Michelangelo and Matisse to Rothko and Turrell, many iconic artists have answered the call to create a compelling chapel. American abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly adds to the canon with the newly opened Austin chapel.

Kelly, who passed away at age 92 in 2015, gifted the design to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas with the stipulations that his exact plans be realised: the building would be permanent, widely accessible to the public, and well maintained. ‘We worked with Ellsworth for about three years on it, collaborating with the architects and figuring out everything down to the minutiae to make sure his intentions large and small were captured,’ says Blanton director Simone Wicha, who was instrumental in bringing Austin to the museum.

The luminous 252 sq m grey limestone building features hand-blown coloured glass windows, a soaring curved redwood ‘totem’, and 14 black-and-white marble panels. The project was originally commissioned for a collector in Santa Barbara in the 1980s, but Ellsworth ultimately decided he did not want it on private land, so the plans were put aside until a museum board member brought it to Wicha’s attention. ‘Austin is a joyful city, a very friendly, creative city. Ellsworth wanted this work to bring joy to people, to provide a place where they could find calm,’ she says.

Carter Foster, deputy director for curatorial affairs, curated the opening exhibition, ‘Form into Spirit’. ‘If you know Ellsworth’s work, the building comes from motifs and forms he’s been exploring his whole career: totems, black and white, colour grid, and spectrum,’ explains Foster. ‘My idea is that people could go into the building and understand, “Oh, he has been doing these ideas for a long time.”’

‘Form into Spirit’ features work in all of these themes, including prints from Kelly’s 1970s Romanesque series and two colour spectrum collages the artist made in France in the 1950s. In addition to the permanent totem in the chapel, Foster included several other wooden sculptures. ‘The totem has this magical relationship to the building,’ says Foster. ‘It is the focal point, but it also leads your eye up to the ceiling.’

The building’s curving white forms and glowing stained glass windows – the first time the artist’s colours have been rendered in glass – create an ethereal, memorable space. Wicha says: ‘It is hard to describe, but nothing replaces the experience of being in there: the materials, the way the light hits, it needs to be seen in person. It is worth coming to Austin just to visit this art and get a breakfast taco... what more could you want?’

INFORMATION

‘Form into Spirit: Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin’ is on view until 29 April. For more information, visit the Blanton Museum of Art website

ADDRESS

Blanton Museum of Art
200 E MLK Jr Boulevard
Austin 

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This self-driving tour of mid-century churches around Palm Springs, new to the 2018 programme of Modernism Week events, presents participants the chance to learn about the town’s most interesting church architecture.

Curated by Michael Kunkle, a Palm Springs local with a passion for mid-century modernism and his mother Ruth Ritter, who just moved to Palm Springs from South Carolina this year, the tour is a unique way to explore the town during Modernism Week.

The tour allowed Kunkle and Ritter to combine their knowledge in a creative way; mixing Kunkle’s architectural and design expertise with Ritter’s experience of churches and religion – and it was a way for the pair to spend time together and build Ritter’s new community network in Palm Springs.

‘In addition to the fantastic architecture, we have learned that the church history here in Coachella valley is colourful: Indians, earthquakes, hardships, cooperation, support and inclusion,’ says Kunkle.

First stop on the Sacred Places tour is the First Baptist Church Palm Springs, designed by architect Howard Lapham in 1963, a textured concrete building with a geometric stained glass window. Kunkle’s tour reveals details such as how materials for the church were donated and it was the congregation who worked on its construction. Lapham also designed ‘arguably the most famous Palm Springs nightclub “Chi Chi’” adds Kunkle.

Another impressive structure - this time constructed of poured concrete in thick curved sections, is the Palm Springs United Methodist church, designed by architect Hal Whittemore in 1965. Unique details include the cast metal cross at its spire designed by artist JB Thompson in 1965 and a plaque on the seat where Elvis Presley used to sit.

Other highlights include Albert Frey’s Desert Chapel, built in 1963, where the original phone system can be admired, as well as intricate geometric wood carvings and chandeliers; and a piercing red stained glass window by artist Gabriel Loire at the St Louis Catholic Cathedral City – designed by architect Joseph F Dameron in the 1960s.

INFORMATION

The ‘Sacred Places’ tour runs on February 24, 2018. For event details visit the Modernism Week website.

At first blush, the decision by the Swiss artist Not Vital to build his latest installation – a concrete chapel set high on a windswept slope – in Bataan was entirely appropriate. Not far from this spot, in April 1942, the victorious Japanese army ordered around 76,000 Filipino and American POW soldiers to begin what eventually became known as the Bataan Death March towards Camp O’Donnell, around 100km away in Tarlac. Barely 54,000 soldiers survived the ordeal.

Vital is, however, careful not to characterise the chapel as a memorial to the atrocity. It is not consecrated, nor is it, despite the abstract references inside to The Last Supper – a giant porcelain piece by Vital – cast specifically to the Christian faith. That notion is discounted by an antique wooden statue of the rice goddess Bulol, carved by the Ifugao tribe in the northern Filipino provinces, that hangs on one of the rough-hewn interior concrete walls.

For Vital, the chapel is the latest in a line of surrealist buildings cum installations he has built out of local materials in remote locations around the world, such as Tschlin, Switzerland and Agadez, Niger. Getting here is, to put it bluntly, a schlepp. It’s a bone-crunching, jaw-smashing drive through a gully hemmed in by shadowy jungle and pockmarked with huge rocks, before you emerge into a sun-blasted plain on which the chapel sits, framed by low hillocks and lazily grazing cattle. In the monsoon months, the road is all but impassable by mechanical means; during construction, bags of concrete had to be brought in by water buffalos when rain turned the gully into a muddy river.

For Vital and his patron, Bellas Artes Projects – a non-profit arts foundation that Jam Acuzar set up in 2013 and runs from her father’s resort Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar in the nearby town of Bagac – the relative inaccessibility of the chapel is kind of the point. ‘It needed to be difficult to get to,’ says Vital, who, at 69, cuts a handsome, dignified figure that’s entirely in keeping with his stature as an eccentric statesman of the arts. The site becomes something like a myth, almost a pilgrimage.’

And like all good myths, the chapel had its genesis as something slightly different. About a decade ago, Vital had begun painting seriously again after years of sculptural output. Haunted by a memory of Joan Miró creating the abstract mural at Barcelona’s airport, he produced a 12 x 5m oil canvas of The Last Supper – Christ and his apostles are represented by 13 black splotches against a white background. The work was eventually transferred to a ceramic panel produced in Jingdezhen, China, one of the world’s hallowed grounds for pottery production.

The dilemma of just where to install the work was solved when a friend introduced Vital to Diana Campbell Betancourt, whom Acuzar had recently appointed artistic director to her foundation. Bellas Artes Projects is located in a fantasist folly where over 40 historical houses from around the Philippines – rescued by Acuzar’s father from demolition, the oldest of which dates to 1640 – have been reassembled and repurposed into hotel rooms.

The foundation’s HQ, built in 1867, was once the home of La Escuela de Bellas Artes, the Philippines’ preeminent and oldest art school. As it turned out, Acuzar was already familiar with Vital’s work from her days in London when she studied at Sotheby’s Institute of Art and freelanced for an art dealer. ‘It’s so rare to find an artist whose works are so inaccessible and magical and yet leave such an indelible mark in the community,’ she says, explaining why she was quick to take on Vital’s project soon after they met.

Though the Las Casas grounds are vast, and there were plenty of potential sites, Vital eventually decided against installing his Last Supper there. Casting around for options, Acuzar brought the artist to her mother’s farm, an isolated en plein airfield in Saysain, about 20 minutes away from the resort. The moment Vital arrived on site, he knew this was what he was looking for. From there, the idea of housing The Last Supper within a simple minimalist structure developed fairly quickly, Vital seeing potential for his own take on the Rothko Chapel in Houston. Seasoned artisans from the Las Casas workshops were assigned to the project, toiling over the next year and a half to raise a trapezoid of poured concrete measuring 16 x 13 x 7.3m.

Vital’s original intention to have smooth interior surfaces was quickly abandoned when the coconut lumber casts were removed and revealed the imprinted patterns and textured surfaces of the fibres. He was so enamoured by the rough beauty that he also decided to leave the ceiling scarred by the concrete that leaked through the casts and dried like rocky stalactites. ‘It’s not completely perfect,’ he says happily.

The result is a structure that’s primitive  in the best traditions of Brutalism and raw concrete architecture. Its silhouette is extraordinary in its geometric form, low hanging on one end and rising smoothly to a broad façade lined on the exterior by 13 highset steps. A horizontal aperture, a clerestory really, runs the entire length of the façade.

Visible from miles away, the building rises mysteriously out of the jungle; its silhouette suggests what a pre-Columbian temple might have looked like had Picasso been in charge of the works. ‘It’s such an arresting work,’ says Acuzar.

Inside, through a door just large enough to fit one person at a time, Vital has flooded the chapel in homage to the rice fields of the Philippines, allowing the water depth to start at 20cm at the entrance before tapering off as one walks up the slope towards The Last Supper, now finally installed on the far wall. During the day, light streams in through the clerestory and casts slanting straight-lined shadows on the walls and on the water. The irregular scorched circles on the wall make a particularly haunting motif, especially when juxtaposed against the figure of Bulol.

As a building, the chapel defies categorisation, something Vital is keen to avoid. ‘Is it art? Is it sculpture? Is it architecture? I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘I’m not an architect, I never went to architecture school. That’s why I’m so free to do this.’

For her part, Diana Campbell Betancourt is ecstatic. ‘Bataan is a place with a very charged history - and the chapel is a beautiful attempt to heal scars from a painful past and contemplate space for a more peaceful future,’ she says. Vital’s chapel is the first project on this particular site and Bellas Artes Projects will continue to produce similar works that involve the community, art, and nature on this and other sites owned by the Acuzar family in Bataan. The dream is that these works will eventually coalesce into a public sculpture park.

And perhaps, one day soon, Bataan will shed the horrors of the 1942 death march with which it is currently synonymous and become, instead, a byword for endeavours considerably more uplifting. Vital is hopeful: ‘You just have to believe.’

As originally featured in the June 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*219)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Bella Arts Projects website

Despite its flashy, copper facade, OOPEAA’s Suvela Chapel, located on a former parking lot in the Helsinki suburb of Espoo, sits lightly in its surrounds. The U-shaped volume fully extends to the perimeter, allowing for a peaceful inner courtyard. Occupying one arm of the U, the soaring main chapel projects onto the street-facing northeast corner. Offices reside in the connecting mid-section, while tranquil community spaces are situated in the other arm.

At its heighest, the chapel vaults to 12m

Juxtaposed against the modesty of the church’s single level, sweeping changes in height deliver architectural drama: while the office wing has a standard ceiling height of 2.8m, the chapel vaults up to 12m. The relatively restricted materials palette of copper and Finnish spruce further heightens the striking contrast between exterior and interior spaces. While the copper steals the limelight street-side, the chapel’s contemplative interiors are clad in spruce. In time, however, the copper will weather and darken, settling in comfortably to its suburban landscape.

As originally featured in the November 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*212)

In time the copper will weather and darken

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the OOPEAA website

'It's not every day that Paris acquires a new cathedral, a new library, a new auditorium and a new bilingual school,' said Paris' mayor Anne Hidalgo at the recent inauguration ceremony of the city's Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Centre.

The monument is located on a highly sensitive UNESCO site in central Paris, steps away from the Eiffel Tower, the banks of the Seine and the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac museum. 'The silhouette of Paris has been redrawn,' says its architect, Jean-Michel Wilmotte.

In designing the new centre, he had three principles: to respect the canons of the Russian Orthodox Church, to incorporate the centre seamlessly into a densely-built Parisian neighbourhood and to create a contemporary building inspired by medieval Orthodox churches, characterised by their sobriety.

'There was no question of creating a caricature,' said Wilmotte. 'It is essentially an urban project, one that prolongs Avenue Rapp across to the Seine, and reveals the [listed] Palais de l'Alma, previously hidden from sight behind the old Méteo France [national meteorological] building.'

These newly open grounds are landscaped by Louis Benech with Russian species, including Mongolian linden trees, red and yellow Siberian apple trees and, in front of the Cathedral, Tartarian maples. 

The centre’s minimalist volumes are orchestrated horizontally in cream-coloured Massangis stone from Burgundy, the same used for the steps of the neighbouring Eiffel Tower, the Jena Bridge and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, delicately blending it into its surroundings. The four buildings that comprise the complex are clad in 12,000 stone modules, constituting dynamically faceted facades that play with light and shadow.

The centre's focal point is the Sainte-Trinité Orthodox Cathedral with its crowning glory, five gold onion domes representing Christ and the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Wilmotte designed these in collaboration with the Patriarch of Moscow.

The gold-coloured domes are a technological and artistic tour de force. Wilmotte insisted that they be completely smooth, rather than faceted, as is their usual means of production. It was decided to use composite materials more common to the aeronautical and naval industries. Multiplast, a company in Vannes that specialises in producing catamarans and the world's first solar powered airplane, fabricated the domes, a world first in building construction.

Not only are they perfectly round, but this technique also makes them considerably lighter. The central dome is 11m in diameter and weighs 8.2 tonnes, as opposed to the 42 tonnes it would have weighed if traditionally produced; the smaller ones are 5.8m in diameter and weigh just 2 tonnes. It took 90,000 leaves of 24 carat gold to cover them in a process that lasted three months.

With the building permit secured, the work was completed in just three years. 'The quality of work has been exceptional throughout. It is, it can be said, a work of art,' concludes Wilmotte. 'Everyone involved can be very proud.'

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Wilmotte & Associés website

ADDRESS

Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Centre
2 avenue Rapp 
1-5 Quai Branly and 192 rue de l’Université 
Paris 75007

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Auratic and avant-garde, Jean-Michel Othoniel is one of the most intriguing names on France’s contemporary art scene. From filling an abandoned boat with tears to installing glass dancers in Versailles’ Water Grove Theatre, his aesthetic transforms galleries, public spaces and historic sites alike. Now, Othoniel is preparing to preview for Wallpaper.com one of his most ambitious projects yet: Le Trésor de la Cathédrale d’Angoulême, an immersive artwork nearly a decade in the making, recently opened to the public.

The sky is still dark when I arrive at Gare Montparnasse, where a photographer and I are to journey to Angoulême with Othoniel. With only a minute until departure, I clutch my coffee, worrying Othoniel is too late, but then there he is, crisply casual and cheerily upbeat for the ungodly hour.

With a rich history that dates back as far as the Roman era, one of the biggest jewels in Angoulême’s crown is the 12th-century cathedral. Between 1852 and 1875, French architect Paul Abadie – of the Sacré Coeur Basilica fame in Paris – restored the building in his signature neo-Romanesque style.

Fast-forward to 2008, when France’s Historic Monuments office, headed by Pierre Cazenave, put in motion a campaign to revisit the cathedral’s interior spaces and breathe new life into Abadie’s restorations.

Working alongside France’s Ministry of Culture and Angoulême’s bishopric, Cazenave decided to commission a contemporary artist to create a new treasury to house 147 pieces, including statues and liturgical objects from the 1800s. Experienced in creating architectural and site-specific artworks for historical locations, Othoniel was a natural choice to take on the project.

We arrive at Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, bells tolling and all. Othoniel brightens at the sight of its facade, depicting the teachings of the Ascension and Last Judgement, which was also restored by Abadie. ‘Like the English Gothic Revival, the Roman period was in fashion in 19th-century France – it was a fantasy, people were dreaming about it – but the 19th century was actually the beginning of modernity,’ he says. Inside, he points out features that inspired his work, from cement floor tiles to stained-glass windows.

‘I wanted to make my designs spectacular but not use rich materials, because the period was about facade and fake objects,’ he says, gesturing to a newly painted plaster statue of St Bernadette. ‘The challenge was to show the quality in things that were not appreciated.’

Othoniel unlocks a heavy wooden door to reveal the first station of Le Trésor, which spans three rooms adjoining the cathedral. Previously a boxy storeroom, this space is now airy and light, complete with large stained-glass windows designed by the artist. A unifying feature throughout the site, these windows depict a sky sprinkled with stars, overlaid with a geometric motif that echoes patterns found on the cathedral’s tiling.

‘They frame the landscape like a painting,’ explains Othoniel. ‘With them I wanted to create a new blue – the blue of Angoulême.’ The first room, walls painted cool lilac, contains a crystal chandelier, wooden chapel chairs and an ornate plasterwork relief. Like the rest of Le Trésor, the space is unfinished at the time of our visit, with areas of restoration still needed and objects yet to be displayed. It will eventually house a lapidary, Roman fragments, and a Madonna and child statue.

Given that Othoniel describes himself as ‘not particularly religious’, I wonder how he approached a commission so steeped in the spiritual. ‘I was interested in the idea of the sacred,’ he replies. ‘This project pushed my ideas of wonder and magic, making a connection between beauty and the radical.’

Up a spiral stone staircase, the second station is revealed, themed around the ritualistic figure of the priest.

Here, ceremonial clothing and object will be housed in glass cases on rows of black glass beads. Fans of Othoniel’s work will recognise his use of hand-blown glass globes made by the same Murano artisans that collaborated on his beaded sculptures, such as Rivière Blanche and Les Lacets Bleus.

‘This project was a real celebration of craft,’ he says. ‘It required a lot of different dialogues, and I worked with more than ten artisans after we first took time to feel and rebuild the space.’ Other examples of the workmanship can be seen in the final station, from the geometric wallpaper and tiles – mirroring the motif on the windows – to the glass vitrines to hold cathedral treasures. More glass beads, tinted blue (symbolising the Virgin’s mantle) and gold (the colour of Christ), support the furniture. A monumental window is the real show-stopper, formed of 10,000 chunks of glass and framed with hundreds of handmade cast aluminium rings, which, I am told, were nearly four years in the making. Rising from the ashes of the cathedral’s bombed-out bell tower, this last room has been transformed into a transcendent space suffused with natural light, illuminating saintly sculptures, religious artefacts and gilded objects.

The space is a masterpiece – but surely one that wasn’t without its challenges. ‘It’s the longest and most complex project I have worked on,’ he says. ‘But I love building a new destination in contemporary art.’ Like his Les Belles Danses, frozen forever in the Sun King’s gardens, Le Trésor is a permanent addition to the cathedral, bringing together past and present to mark a new stage of its history.

‘Yes, exactly! An artist is part of history. I am not an artist of fracture – I am one of continuity,’ he enthuses, face lit blue and gold in the light of a window. ‘Maybe, in 200 years, someone can rewrite my period.’

As originally featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*211)

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Galerie Perrotin website

The Kericho diocese is set in the highlands of Kenya in a vividly green spot west of the Great Rift Valley, around 250km south west of the capital Nairobi. Here, the air is perfumed by thick swathes of greenery and tea plantations. And perched on a grassy knoll, with commanding views of the surrounding valley, terraced village and distant hills, the diocese has built a new, beautifully articulated cathedral for its Roman Catholic congregation.

The London-based John McAslan + Partners was tapped for the job after the client attended a lecture the firm had given about its Malawi schools projects.

The design and construction of the Sacred Heart Cathedral, clad in washed terrazzo, involved two primary challenges. The first ‘was to discover a truly authentic Kenyan language for the design which would root the building in its context and the great tradition of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical architecture', says the architects' Aidan Potter. 'The second was to deliver the quality of construction, particularly in the formation of the expressed concrete structure, that is the primary constituent of the cathedral’s architectural expression.’

The first challenge was solved by inserting an enormous ascending vaulted volume beneath the clay-tiled pitched roof. The second involved applying a palette of simple, locally-sourced materials, all worked on by a team of skilled artisans – Kericho-grown cypress timber slats for the curved ceiling, doors and furniture, Kenyan granite and Nairobi Blue stone floors and podium, and statues carved from local soap stone.

Both literally and figuratively, an ineffable sense of light infuses the space. The soaring interiors are capped by a length of filtered skylight, while the nave is punched through with a vertical window. Both transepts open on both ends for natural cross ventilation.

‘We were fortunate to have a client who believed that the integrity and honesty of construction and style related to context was worth fighting for,’ says Potter. The result speaks amply to this belief.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the John McAslan + Partners website

Photography: Edmund Sumner

When visiting Salisbury Cathedral, it's hard not to be awestruck by the way light filters through its towering stained glass windows. While some date back to the 13th century others are more recent – like Gabriel Loire's striking Prisoners of Conscience window, which was installed in 1980. With this rich tradition it seems fitting that the early English Gothic Cathedral should stage an exhibition of glass art.

Running until November this year, 'Reflections' sees nine internationally renowned artists create spectacular site-specific works within the Cathedral, based around the theme of 'reflection'. Scattered around the Cathedral’s grounds, both inside and out, the works form a visual response to the building’s dramatic medieval architecture.

Curated by Jacquiline Creswell, Salisbury Cathedral’s arts advisor, alongside Rebecca Newnham, a sculptor who works with glass, the exhibition showcases a diverse range of approaches and production techniques.

Outside, ambitiously scaled pieces like Newnham’s arched Launch sculpture, with its plumage-like glass mosaic skin, frame the Cathedral’s majestic exterior, while inside Livvy Fink’s phosphorescent kiln-cast glass sculptures and New Zealand artist Galia Amsel’s swooping fibre optic glass tubes mysteriously glow in the shadows.

The cathedral, which has long tradition of hosting exhibitions, uses art to communicate a wider message to its congregation and visitors. ’I have always been fascinated by glass,' says Creswell. 'It is a material to look through in order to see out. Its intrinsic purity captures the imagination. The alchemical transformation of sand into a precious, crystal clear, frozen form commands respect and reverence. Like architecture, glass divides light and space and in addition glass has magical qualities beyond its physicality.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Salisbury Cathedral's website

Photography: Ash Mills

To celebrate the near completion of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt’s Australian Islamic Centre – located at Hobsons Bay, Melbourne – the National Gallery of Victoria has unveiled its newest exhibition, titled ‘Architecture of Faith’, which will expose the multi-layered process behind the Centre’s creation.

Throughout the build, Pritzker Prize-winner Murcutt worked closely with Hakan Elevli of Melbourne practice Elevli Plus and the Newport Islamic Council, also calling upon the consultation of Islamic architects, imams and the local community. This constant communication with the Centre’s future visitors consequently led to the creation of a highly functional, communal space which provides a new type of architectural language for Australian Islam.

Noticeably lacking a minaret or dome, the Centre is a bright and colourful creation, featuring a roof studded with multicoloured glass lanterns. Murcutt’s design hoped to push the architectural envelope, whilst simultaneously respecting the fundamental principles and requirements of traditional Islamic architecture, to envision a contemporary, accessible place of worship.

Showcasing over 200 original sketches by Murcutt, ‘Architecture of Faith’ will reveal the history of and people involved in the Centre’s ten-year conception. The exhibition will illustrate Murcutt's multilayered design via a presentation of architectural drawings, plans, photographs, scale models and documentation of the nearly completed complex.

Even though the Australian Islamic Centre is due to open later this year, ‘Architecture of Faith’ will provide its future visitors with an early inside glimpse into the project from a variety of perspectives. The exhibit hopes to highlight the various contributions the project will make to the surrounding community and its ability to foster intercultural understanding.

INFORMATION

’Architecture of Faith’ is on view until 19 February 2017. For more information, visit the National Gallery of Victoria’s website

Photography: Sean Fennessy

ADDRESS

National Gallery of Victoria
180 St Kilda Road
Melbourne VIC 3006

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Just south of Beirut, in Lebanon’s rich Shouf Valley, a newly completed church embraces the material heritage that surrounds it. Designed by Paris-based architect Maroun Lahoud, St. Elie’s is a modern take on the traditional Maronite churches found throughout Lebanon, and its white stone cladding provides a striking contrast to the area’s abundant greenery.

The church was commissioned by Lebanon’s Ministry of the Displaced, which seeks to rehabilitate infrastructure following the country’s civil war and also aid in reconciliation between the area’s Maronite and Druze communities.

Settled into the terraced landscape, this new place of Maronite worship centres around two square volumes that sit atop a sunken base. 'Its aspect embodies the characteristics of the Maronite Church; pure massing and flat roof,' Lahoud said. The façade also extends upwards in the form of a short, solid bell tower, another key structural element in the Maronite tradition.

To create the ‘pure massing’ noted by Lahoud, the architects drew from local sources, and there are two different yet complimentary material surfaces at work. The base, which houses the church’s annexes and a multipurpose hall, is made up of dry stone walling local to the site, and originally made up local homes that were destroyed during the civil war.

Sitting atop the semi-sunken stone walling are the main volumes of the church, which are made up of white bush-hammered stone cladding. The church appears pure white from a distance, but the locally quarried stones actually provide for a tonal range that plays off the day’s changing sunlight.

The church is filled with natural light by way of Lahoud’s minimal cruciform windows, carved directly into the church’s stone, and through the simplistic lined windows located above the altar and along the sides of the structure. 'The white walls seem to diffuse natural light,' Lahoud said, 'the marble floor reflecting it in turn.'

INFORMATION

For more information on St. Elie’s, visit Maroun Lahoud's website

Rosario-based architect Nicolás Campodónico recently unveiled designs for a new chapel placed in the heart of a ranch in the outskirts of La Playosa, a village with less than 3,000 inhabitants, three hours drive from Córdoba city. 

Tailored to reflect the needs of modern worshippers – the owners of the estancia as well as the locals – Saint Bernard's Chapel, named after the local patron saint, breathes new life into the site with a 92 m sq structure made entirely from the remains of a former dwelling found on the site.

Nestled between a grove and wild fields, a simple brick-box exterior is cleverly combined with artfully curved interiors, giving the space a uniquely organic feel. The private sanctuary's volume opens up towards the sun, capturing the natural light of the sunset in the central space, enveloping worshippers in a womb-like haze. 

Campodónico's first religious project is certainly elevating, not just because of its natural surroundings and complete absence of modern services, but also because of its subtle yet meaningful design. Set apart along the exterior, a vertical and horizontal pole cast playful shadows against the interior walls, creating a cross when the sunset brings the intersecting lines together.  

'The crucifixion is conceptually completed here with the union of two poles,' explains the architect. 'Every day, the shadows of the poles make their way separately [around the curved interior], representing the via crucis, to finally meet and recreate the cross, which is not only a symbolic cross but a ritualistic one,' bringing a cosmic dimension and elevating the brick structure into a conceptual space.  
 
If nothing else, Campodónico has succeeding in creating a religious environment that connects nature with the search of the divine.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the website of Nicolás Campodónico

Designs for Abu Dhabi's latest grand religious space have just been revealed by AL_A. The London based architecture practice, headed by Amanda Levete with directors Ho-Yin Ng, Alice Dietsch and Maximiliano Arrocet, has just won the competition for the commission to design a new mosque.

Located in the World Trade Centre complex – which is being designed by Foster + Partners to include from offices, to residences, a mall, a souk and a hotel – for Aldar Properties, one of the region's largest developers, this new project will span an impressive 2,000 sq m. This will include the mosque structure, as well as plenty of outside space in the form of an informal park. 

The park will also act as 'an escape from the immediate context of the vertiginous steel and glass of the World Trade Center and provide a focal point of worship for its inhabitants'. For this reason, the space was not seen as a single building, but was conceived as a symbolic 'pathway' to serenity. The trees are aligned with the mosque structure's columns, leading people inside – the direction then shifts towards Mecca.

The project is headed by Ng, who explains: 'The Mosque is envisaged as a piece of the city, one that reflects the journey from the temporal to the spiritual. Set within a park, the mosque and the garden become one, with the trees and the columns forming an informal vertical landscape and allowing Friday prayers to spill outside.'

Inside, a permeable roof structure will allow light to flow into the prayer hall, creating a dramatic visual effect for sunlight and shadows. 

The sculptural and peaceful space incorporates the Islamic architectural tradition for arches, which will be made using modern techniques and materials – AL_A are known for their experimentation with both – bridging the old and the new within a single design.

INFORMATION

For more information visit the AL_A website

As worshipping practices evolve to reflect the modern world, spaces of religious veneration are being tailored to reflect the needs of modern worshippers. Cologne based architecture firm RSAA / Büro Ziyu Zhuang recently unveiled designs for a new church complex in China's Zhangjiagang district, marking a noteworthy new addition to this category. 

The project consists of a central building surrounded by a ring of supporting structures that will collectively serve the community, as well as sheltering the inner basilica from street noise. The northern buildings will consist of prayer rooms and counselling spaces, whilst to the south there will be a cafeteria, library, museum and a smaller church. The aesthetic will be modern in conception. Curved interiors, formed by numerous metal slices, give the space a very organic feel and the central space will envelop the worshipper in a womb-like curve.

In its ground plan the main edifice will adhere to a conventional nave and steeple formation but, by positioning the entrance directly in front of a lake, the architects break with convention and create a strong sense of connection with the natural world.  

An affinity with the environment is a trend that has grown in religious architecture in recent years. For example, Knarvik Community Church in Norway has been designed by Reiulf Ramstad Architects so that it nestles into a hillside; while AZL Architects' Nanjing Wanjing Garden Chapel in China has been erected on the city's riverfront.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit RSAA / Büro Ziyu Zhuang's website

Christ Church Spitalfields, widely regarded as the masterpiece of English Baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, is opening its crypt to the public for the first time in its some 300 year history. Funded by the Monument Trust and sensitively refurbished by Dow Jones Architects, the space now encompasses a new café, gallery and performance space. Works to the crypt follow the restoration of the nave in 2003 and the Baroque organ in June this year, completing a three-phase redevelopment of the grade I listed building.

The design ambition was to support activities in the nave with the ability to operate independently for venue hire. Three bold gestures define the remodelled crypt; a grand entrance ramp, the creation of a flexible open-plan environment and the insertion of timber volumes to accommodate support facilities. Hawksmoor envisaged the west elevation as an arched gateway to the city, representing the connection between centre and edge. Embracing this notion, Dow Jones conceived the entrance ramp as a continuation of the street, connecting the buried crypt to the city. Fashioned in York stone with metal railings, the ramp references the familiar features of the London streetscape.

Historically, the crypt had been subdivided in a piecemeal manner.  Now, non-structural elements are stripped out, revealing Hawksmoor’s magnificent vaulted structure. The Portland stone columns have been restored to their original state and lime render to the brick vaulted soffits replaces a tired plaster finish, unifying the spacious interior with a bright undulating soffit. Daylight and ventilation are capitalized from perimeter clerestory windows, augmented by new lighting and mechanical systems.

The crisp appearance of the lightweight timber walls inserted between the heavy stone structure, creates a clear dialogue between old and new. Housing the ancillary spaces and concealing service routes, the unvarnished oak elements play an understated role, allowing the newly formed views of Hawksmoor’s impressive architecture to take centre stage.

The design intent was to feel connected to but separate from the nave, offering the option for the space to operate independently. As part of the church’s sustainable business plan, both the nave and crypt can be hired out. The new catering kitchen and café provides the flexibility to service dinners for up to 250 and receptions for up to 600 people

The underground crypt capitalizes on natural daylight and ventilation from perimeter clerestory windows, augmented by new lighting and mechanical systems, discreetly incorporated into the design of the timber panelled walls

Support facilities including wc's, kitchen and servery counters are housed in complimentary timber interventions inserted between structural bays. A distinction is created by the timber panelling, with primary spaces lined in a plank and muntin staggered board style, and back of house areas lined in tongue and grooved boards

Hawksmoor envisaged the west elevation as an arched gateway, representing the connection between centre and edge. Dow Jones embraced this notion, conceiving the York stone topography and metal railing of the entrance ramp as a continuation of the street into the crypt

The brick vaults of the entrance vestibule had never been plastered and for this reason are left in their original state. The oak insertions are detailed to incorporate service routes, integrating air supply, acoustic attenuation, lighting and AV

INFORMATION

For more information on Dow Jones Architects visit the website

Photography: David Grandorge

Images of architectural icons are common enough; after all, the pioneering British photographer William Henry Fox Talbot snapped Westminster Abbey way back in the 19th century. But now the Yossi Milo Gallery in Chelsea is spotlighting the German photographer Markus Brunetti's highly individualistic take on that genre in 'Facades' – the photographer's first exhibition in the United States – capturing historic cathedrals, cloisters and monasteries throughout Europe. The show deftly demonstrates his dazzling creativity.

To create a single work, Brunetti first snaps upwards of 100 images, focusing on frequently overlooked stone statutes, before airbrushing out extraneous elements like cars and street lights to create a riveting composite image. The detail is starling, with viewers getting to gaze up close at the mosaics tucked under the roofline of the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta in Orvieto. Elsewhere, lichen is clearly revealed.

Brunetti's vast image archive factors architectural styles ranging from the early Romanesque and Gothic, through Renaissance and Baroque to the contemporary. 'He captures these immense churches – one as tall as 530 ft,' says Milo, who has included an image measuring a towering 10 ft in height in the exhibition. 'This size will immerse the viewer and present the facade in its purest form,' he adds. In some instances, Brunetti also drenches images in a surreal palette, skewing these monolithic structures further.

Consider this show the ultimate walk through the Reims Cathedral and on to Chartres. For those on the other side of the pond, Brunetti's iconic images can also be seen in Axel Vervoordt's 'Proportio' exhibition at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice until 22 November.

INFORMATION
Copyright Markus Brunetti, courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery, New York. ’Markus Brunetti: Facades’ is on show at Yossi Milo Gallery until 17 October

ADDRESS

Yossi Milo Gallery
245 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10001

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