Detail of the project ed. 2016

hol­­ly-spir­it-chapel / Cazu Zegers Architecture

Design­er	María del Car­men Zegers
Loca­tion	Calle La Colo­nia, Puente Alto, San­ti­a­go, Región Met­ro­pol­i­tana, Chile
Design Team	Cazú Zegers
Year	2008
Pho­to credits	EXT 01.jpg — Guy Wenborne EXT 02.jpg — Guy Wenborne EXT 03.jpg — Guy Wenborne EXT 04.jpg — Guy Wenborne EXT 05.jpg — Guy Wenborne INT 01.jpg — Daniel Pinilla INT 02.jpg — Daniel Pinilla INT 03.jpg — Daniel Pinilla INT 04.jpg — Daniel Pinilla INT 05.jpg — Daniel Pinilla

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

The Church is designed for a poor com­mu­ni­ty in a periph­er­al neigh­bor­hood of San­ti­a­go. The church is the shape of the com­mu­ni­ty, and this com­mu­ni­ty is joy­ful, gen­er­ous and hard work­ing. They want­ed the build­ing to have a cir­cu­lar space with the altar close to the peo­ple and wide aisles to meet.
A sin­gle ascend­ing wall gen­er­ates the archi­tec­ton­ic ges­ture that shapes the church; it revolves around itself with­out clos­ing com­plete­ly, to wrap us and con­nect us with the divine, open­ing towards the light with a cen­tral sky­light that sym­bol­izes the light of Christ. The walls come togeth­er until a small expan­sion that lets the light come in, like the hands of God wel­com­ing the community.
The mold­ing that shapes the con­crete needs a high lev­el of tech­ni­cal knowl­edge in order to achieve the con­tin­u­ous curves required by the design, with­out chang­ing the true nature of the shapes, giv­en that the fin­ish­ing mate­r­i­al is the con­crete itself. The lam­i­nat­ed wood beams that define the cen­tral sky­light, struc­ture the roof with­out ver­ti­cal columns inter­rupt­ing the spa­tial con­ti­nu­ity. Struc­tural­ly, they also divide the build­ing in two, and even though the chapel exper­i­ments a high torque, its behav­ior in the seis­mic Chilean ter­ri­to­ry has been impeccable.
The ther­mic com­fort is achieved by holes in the perime­ter of the floor and open­ings in the sky­light that allow the air to flow dur­ing hot sum­mer days. A lat­tice sys­tem gives the space the acoustic com­fort nec­es­sary to enter a state of con­tem­pla­tion, prayer and rev­er­ence, where we should not have sound rever­ber­a­tion, even though the con­crete and the shape of the chapel would make it so. This project was done with gen­er­ous resources, which trans­lates into its great spa­tial qual­i­ty; thanks to this it became an archi­tec­ton­ic state­ment of social trans­for­ma­tion. Enhanc­ing the self-esteem of an entire com­mu­ni­ty which even now days man­i­fests a strong con­nec­tion with the church, believ­ing that it is miraculous.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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