Detail of the project ed. 2020

MAYU – TUNG MEN HOLI­NESS CHURCH

Design­er	Yu-lin Chen
Loca­tion	No. 18, Lane 15, Deguang Street, East Dis­trict, Tainan City, Taiwan
Design Team	Mal­one Chang, Yu-lin Chen (Archi­tects), Sheng-Yang Huang, Elis­a­beth Lebas (Com­pe­ti­tion), Yu-Ling Liu, Ting-Yi Lo, Miao-Ling Cheng (SD/DD/CD), Yong-Sian Fang (CA)
Year	2016
Pho­to credits	Shawn Liu Studio

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

This project orig­i­nates from a vision that the pas­tor has received from God: Tainan Tung-Men Holi­ness Church (TMHC) sym­bol­izes an eagle as a bib­li­cal metaphor, and it is like an air­port, serv­ing as a board­ing gate for non-believ­ers to enter into God’s kingdom.

The site of the new church is sur­round­ed by sec­u­lar res­i­den­tial build­ings. Respond­ing to this con­tex­tu­al city fab­ric as well as the pastor’s vision, the low­er floors of the church are used as social­iz­ing spaces such as cof­fee shop and fam­i­­ly-friend­­ly book store, invit­ing the com­mu­ni­ty in and knit­ting the church close­ly with the life of the neigh­bor­hood. On the oth­er hand, the dema­te­ri­al­iz­ing, white stair­case lead­ing to the sanc­tu­ary above trans­forms the spa­tial char­ac­ter­is­tic from the mun­dane to sanc­ti­fied space by guid­ing the act of ris­ing and turn­ing through spilled nat­ur­al light. 

Where the sanc­tu­ary sig­ni­fies as the holy space to wor­ship God, it is a raised two-sto­ry cubi­cal vol­ume formed by cast-in-place archi­tec­tur­al con­crete and illu­mi­nat­ed by soft and sacred light fil­tered through the alu­minum per­fo­rat­ed screens on the church exte­ri­or. A can­tilevered wood stair­case at the back of the sanc­tu­ary takes the user through the sky fig­u­ra­tive­ly before con­nect­ing back into the sanc­tu­ary mez­za­nine. The user has a dif­fer­ent visu­al expe­ri­ence at the open mez­za­nine and the adja­cent nurs­ery look­ing back into the sanc­tu­ary. The white ver­ti­cal stair­case ter­mi­nates at church’s top floor, which con­sists of three sep­a­rate pray rooms. The user stand­ing at the top land­ing of the stair­case looks out onto the promi­nent white cross ris­ing above the span­drel glass in close dis­tance to the glass exte­ri­or of the stairway.

The church is main­ly com­posed of cool archi­tec­tur­al con­crete but bal­anced with warm wood and cop­per col­ors used for curved sanc­tu­ary ceil­ing, oak stair­case and feath­­er-like met­al screens on the main facade.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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