Detail of the project ed. 2024

igre­­ja-nova-grana­­da / Brazil

Design­er	Homã Alvi­co
Loca­tion	Aveni­da Ola­vo Bilac, 801, CEP 15440–000, Nova Grana­da — São Paulo
Nation	Brazil
Design Team	Homã Alvi­co
Year	2021
Pho­to credits	Julia Novoa

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Project descrip­tion

We received an invi­ta­tion to car­ry out this project that should be a sym­bol of devo­tion to the mem­o­ry of our ances­tors, and a reminder to the present that the log­ic of cap­i­tal has become a reli­gion of the so-called non-reli­­gious, to devel­op a pri­vate real estate oper­a­tion with­out the pur­pose of a finan­cial return would be blas­phe­my in this entourage.
Dur­ing the design process, research was car­ried out on the essen­tial val­ues of prim­i­tive Chris­tian­i­ty. Know­ing the bib­li­cal metaphors and alle­gories that use mate­r­i­al ele­ments to explain meta­phys­i­cal or spir­i­tu­al rela­tion­ships and some­how bring these mate­r­i­al sym­bols on the walls, floor and ceil­ing, mak­ing the space a nar­ra­tive scenario.
The project pro­gram was very suc­cinct; a hall for about 70 peo­ple, bath­rooms and a small office. The biggest chal­lenge was to devel­op an implan­ta­tion that spa­tial­ly account­ed for this scale in a cor­ner plot of just 153 sqm, mea­sur­ing 8.5m by 18m in length that was kind urban­is­ti­cal­ly speak­ing. Not only serv­ing the church mem­bers, but the locals as well, we did­n’t want to add anoth­er wall to the side­walk, or reduce the cor­ner’s visu­al cone.
After some tests of pos­si­ble ways to house this pub­lic, it became clear that the ellipse with the axis rotat­ed by 16° was our best option, thus we man­aged to elim­i­nate the idle spaces that formed in the cor­ners of the hall if the shape was a rec­tan­gle, reach­ing a com­par­a­tive­ly small­er area for the same num­ber of users, and still pro­vide an urban flu­id­i­ty for pedes­tri­ans, adopt­ing the free areas of this cor­ner lot as a con­tin­u­a­tion of the side­walk, with uses of a small pub­lic square, with­out gates or walls, a invi­ta­tion to coexistence.
Con­cep­tu­al­ly, the dual­ism between earth and sky, body and spir­it, mat­ter and light, opac­i­ty and trans­paren­cy sep­a­rat­ed by base and cov­er was sought. For the mate­ri­al­i­ty of the base, mas­sive clay bricks were used, which bib­li­cal­ly rep­re­sents the body in sev­er­al pas­sages, cit­ing two of them, where the first talks about the cre­ation of man, and the sec­ond about the fig­ure of God as a potter;

Explana­to­ry report of the project
Down­load report

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Tech­ni­cal drawings

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