Travassos Chapel
A small concrete and wooden chapel in the middle of the shale stone of the Douro region, World Heritage of Humanity.
How to draw a small religious building today in a world heritage context?
Given the changes in liturgical rites, it is appropriate here, the deconstruction of the models?
The light, primordial element of architecture, how to capture, treat and control?
And how to build with as low budget?
These were some of the issues raised and that accompanied the beginning of the lonely design process.
One certainty: In these times of extreme crisis, the architecture should fulfill their social role, responding with rational solutions, controlled, sober. It is no time to "exceptionalities" who consume media and unjustified demands for notoriety.
The concept was based on the demand for a functional and structural elementarily that met the program's meager request: a chapel for a hundred faithful.
The building in the landscape sought to introduce a public sense of iconographic character, using volumetric games and a choice of synthetic materials for a quiet statement.
The exceptional stone wall at the site pre-defined receive new construction.
The result is, as suspected - perhaps in the background, always intended - paradoxical. The building is unmistakably modern, yet obeys the same plant used in the Romanesque period.
The strong respect for the context of the Douro, in their colors, textures, shadows, inhibited me from the temptation to replicate the basic. Hence the neutral plastic concrete offers.
This coexistence of two worlds is possible, an area crippled by "architectures" anonymous?
Can (also) the concrete praise the shale stone?
It seemed so ...
Paulo Moura
