Updated: Sep 16
The Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt
Whatching a Juhani Pallasmaa lecture some days ago, he was pointing the Karnak Temple in Luxor, Egypt, as one of his favourite buildings ever. It remembered me how little I felt and how amazed I was, when I visited it twenty years ago.
Some buildings extend the limits of our senses into a kind of extra-sensorial experience.
Tasting the beauty of things may be the closest human experience of feeling God.
Updated: Sep 16
Divino Salvador Church, the will of silence.
Designing a religious building, specifically a Catholic church, is an exercise that all architects aim to. We, architects, wish it from a very early age, still in the school, when our teachers are free to propose the themes for the academic projects, encouraging us to study and develop a critical sense about this or that subject. The semiotic and the ritual catholic language are fertile ground for whatever artist or designer.
While in the university I had that chance. Perhaps the echoes that Santa Maria’s church, designed by Siza Vieira, caused in the national and international architectural panorama, had awakened my teachers to attribute an academic exercise of designing a church in Porto, at Foz do Douro.
I remember it as an exercise that sharpened my creativity, especially in finding ways to escape Siza’s building. About the liturgical space and its symbolic richness, by translating all the Christian elements meaning into a coherent and critical thought, the question was taken with less effort. Perhaps because it was an academic exercise, or because there are so few churches built nowadays, that I would not expect the construction of one in my professional future. I barely guessed.
Ten years ago, I was invited by Fr. Manuel Brito to carry out the project for the new church in Freamunde. On that day, I realized that I was facing one of the biggest challenges of my professional life. It was a bipolar day, made of dreams and fears, with all the respect that the opportunity deserved.
Some circumstances prevented me from disassociating the project’s process from my personal life, starting by the project’s location, which I knew since I was a little boy, to the questioning of other more profound issues regarding the Christian space and my own personal beliefs and faith.
Reading Juan Plazaola, I came across the leitmotiv that set the tone of all project. The theologian wrote "let us make our churches islands of peace and silence". I thought, a work of faith is a task for a lifetime, and it may not be enough, but about this ‘silence’ he writes, I believe I know something.
I was certain that I should design a filter, an element that would establish the transition between the street and the temple, between the boiling of the world and the serenity of the island of silence that Plazaola glimpsed. So, the churchyard was born as the great distribution element of all project, present in all sketches since the first designing phases.
I also knew that I wouldn’t want the new church to compete with the old baroque church of São Salvador just aside. I have a lot of respect for that building, because of its architecture, and because of the personal facts and memories that I associate to it. In there my parents were married, in there I was baptized, in there I watched over my father. I knew that both buildings should coexist in a serene and balanced way, without the importance of one stepping over the other, without the new building stealing prominence from the old one or revering to it.
The entire volume of the new Freamunde’s church was designed looking for this balance in each line. Today, as I walk through the space already constructed, I think I have quite achieved the symbiosis between the two temples. At the site, the old Mother Church of São Salvador and the new Church seem to be elements of the same group, almost inseparable, even though the two buildings reveal their expression and personality with no shame. On Freamunde’s horizon, the old bell tower reappears, embracing the new cube of light, both inviting to the same meeting.
It was by the search and understanding of the community real needs, combined with the study of the Christian space and the liturgical renewal driven by the Vatican Council II, that I revolved my imagination in order to try an adequate contemporary response to the project. By being critical and analytic in the study and understanding of the symbolism and importance of each liturgical element, I have tried to materialize a responsible answer, through clear formal options, some manifestly new, others reinterpreting the legacy of History, in a gesture similar to Bachelard's reasoning, of evoking the memories of space. Time will dictate whether I have achieved it or not.
Updated: Sep 16
