- Area: 2100 m²
- Year: 2008
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Photographs:Ivica Bralic
Text description provided by the architects. The Church Parish Complex has the intention to provide with its contents a new life quality to the New Zagreb part of the city, particularly Travno quarter. In the course of process of creating this project, a particular attention has been dedicated to sacrality as a universal architectural topic. The essential issue is that the church is not only a building but an “alive“ believers’ community - meeting point and a "house of prayer".
The disposition of the building volume has been generated by the influences that are arising from the context – proper structure of the existing urban surrounding area. The building is positioned on the western edge of central green area in the interspace between „megavolume of the housing building so-called Mammoth--the largest housing block in the South –East Europe (approx. 5000 residents)“ and a green park area of the central part of this quarter. Thus, it proceeds with the urban sequence of grouping quarter public buildings (school, kindergarten, culture, media centre, church) in the border area surrounding park.
The building is composed of two main volumes. A dominant volume containing the main church hall, i.e. sacred space conceived as a central building in compliance with the Second Vatican Council Reform. In the spatial concept, the idea of alive community is dominant, i.e. the believers are surrounding the altar.
There are service rooms beneath the sacred space in the basement, among them there are halls for movie projection, organization of seminars, lectures and the like, then Internet club for young parishioners as well as a storage room and sanitary facilities.
From the west side next to the Church corpus, an annex of Parish House is located with its contents related to the social community life. Inside the Parish House premises, the following premises are envisaged: religious teaching classrooms, Caritas offices, Parish Office on the ground floor, and a living area, including the apartments for the Parish Priest and chaplain and a big dining room and kitchen on the first floor. Both parts of the building are connected by the glass bridge on the first floor which allows a direct communication between the sacred space and housing part of the Parish House.
The volumes of the Church and Parish House form, from the southern entrance side, plateau of the square in front of the entrance to the Church. The square plateau is lightly extruded in relation to the surrounding area.
In a process of creating this project, a particular attention was dedicated to the treatment of light as an architectural medium. An important characteristic of the Church interieur is the penetration of light (cross carved into the wall, roof light cubes, stripe of light over altar, way of cross, tabernacle, etc.) by which the architectural idea is emphasized by the play of light and shadow, as well as the sacrality of space. The building substance of architecture (wall, column, ceiling) makes the architecture enliven in the context of interrelations of lights.
