Detail of the project ed. 2016

igre­­ja-varzea / Fcc Arquitectura

Design­er  Ana Loureiro
Loca­tion  Largo da Igre­ja de S. Jorge de Várzea, Felgueiras
Design Team  

Ana Loureiro
Fer­nan­do Coelho
Year  2009
Pho­to credits  

FG+SG Fer­nan­do Guerra

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

It was pro­posed to the stu­dio FCC archi­tec­ture, the inte­ri­or ren­o­va­tion of an exist­ing Catholic church in Felgueiras, Portugal.

“It was sculpt­ed a space inside the exist­ing build­ing, such as a cap­sule that turns off from the out­side world … that makes us look beyond what we see, that caus­es us to stop and feel”

The old church, built by the hands of the peo­ple for more than 30 years ago has been recov­ered, mak­ing it more func­tion­al, mod­ern and wide, improv­ing the acoustics and the com­fort of space. It was intend­ed to build a new church with­in the old.

The church holds 500 peo­ple in a sin­gle body. The first draw­ing out­line is engraved on the door and por­trays “the moun­tain as a place of the man­i­fes­ta­tion of God”, and this sen­tence also sum­ma­rizes the whole project and is reflect­ed to the cuts and shapes that define the inter­ven­tion. The inside of the church alludes to the moun­tains, present in the Bible as meet­ing places with the divine.

The form was devel­oped to take shape and life, respond­ing to the chal­lenge of a vital struc­ture of an organ­ism. A kind of build­ing, or form, which takes shel­ter with­in the exist­ing building.

Cor­ru­gat­ed roof of a new skin in the inside, allow­ing the entry of light through many holes with unshaped form, rem­i­nis­cent of water droplets.

The entire con­struc­tion was devel­oped in plas­ter­board, which rests on a base in estremoz mar­ble, coat­ing with stone, the low­er lev­el of the walls, appear­ing in a sym­met­ric form.

The altar, the bap­tismal font, and the cross of Christ, were made by the sculp­tor Paulo Neves, who carved fin­ger­prints in the pieces, giv­ing a mys­ti­cal iden­ti­ty to the space, the same way that invites reflec­tion and med­i­ta­tion by ref­er­ence to the spi­rals, which are always present in his work.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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