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Architects: ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo
- Area: 42141 ft²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Joana França
Text description provided by the architects. The architectural concept adopted unfolds itself from the relationship between spirituality, nature, and community. Spirituality communicates itself in the Catholic religion through its rites, celebrations, and sacred symbols. The sacred sense stands and renovates itself through the sensitive contact of nature, which evokes the divine presence and the integration with the cosmos. Architecture, on its turn, has been the privileged space of manifestation of the sacred by the person who occupies it, where the light penetrates delicately or where the silence of the stone manifests itself in the murmur of the prayers. The circular nave brings as a concept this gesture of welcoming, as it approximates the altar to the congregation.
Natural light penetrates through the roof circular ring, transforming the internal space of the nave, which is disposed half level below the natural height of the plot. This allows the overflow of the landscape through a small opening aligned to the ground floor, at the same time that it preserves the intimacy of the internal space. Such a feature is only possible due to the elevation of the circular concrete volume, suspended by six pillars that belong to the structural foundation implanted in the topography. By revealing the presence of the horizon, the architecture becomes a constitutive element of the landscape, an opening to the poetic dimension of the world, connecting the material reality to its spectator’s gaze.
It is possible to state that the architectural concept synthesizes the three fundamental premises of Brasilia: the implantation of the architectural complex, delicately applied on the topography, and its opening to the horizon; the inseparability between the urban and its architecture, between public and private space and, as a consequence, between the community and the sacred; and thirdly, the consideration of the landscape as a structuring and fundamental element of the architectural configuration, recognized by Brasilia’s inclusion on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage Sites.
