Chapel of the Earth / Cabrera Arqs

Curated by Clara Ott
CHAPEL • CHICXULUB, MEXICO
Architects : Cabrera Arqs
Area : 699 ft²
Year : 2020
Photographs : Tamara Uribe
Manufacturers : AutoDesk, Predecon
Lead Architect : Enrique Cabrera Peniche
Design Team : Arqta. Alejandra Andrade Butzmann, M.Arq.Psj. Jorge Enriquez Dominguez
Clients : Residencial Baspul
Collaborators : Predecon
City : Chicxulub
Country : Mexico

Textual content description offered by the architects. The Chapel of the Earth is positioned on the border between a rural housing improvement and a small city within the inside of Yucatán. With out eager to impose a non secular landmark that was a part of the housing improvement, however a gathering level for all of the residents of the world. It blends in, disappearing from the speedy panorama and performing as a border component between the 2 territorial techniques.

The Chapel is ecumenical, born from the developer’s need to serve the group made up of members of various spiritual beliefs. It’s meant to be a spot of reflection, silence and prayer, in addition to having an intrinsic contact with nature. The arrival on the Chapel is initially preceded by a concrete body that enables to visualise an extended stroll on a not very steep slope and escorted by Chaka bushes, a path that appears to steer deep into the earth, exposing its partitions through which pure textures invade the grooves of the layers of time and on the finish an area the place you may benefit from the silence and the sounds of nature.

As soon as the tour is completed, the Chapel welcomes you with a concrete slab that goes back and forth of the partitions like a airplane that sits on the stone partitions; It’s a slab of semicircular vaults, which makes conceptual reference to the church buildings and colonial buildings within the space, the supplies are rustic, at all times searching for probably the most punctual relationship with nature, two rows of benches slim the trail to border the house extra necessary: The Altar.

The second house, the primary one, the Altar, appears to be the tip of a cavern with the vault open making a window to heaven.

On the finish of the cavern there’s a physique of water, referring to the cenotes which are shaped as a part of some underground river of the various which have their route within the subsoil of the peninsula. This creates much more a sense of isolation and reflection, offering the best house to search out your self.

“The Chapel of the Earth” was designed to be interpreted freely by the “speaker.” It doesn’t intend to impose a lesson in house, quite the opposite, it invitations you to take possession of it relying on the second, the local weather, the sunshine and the time.

Subsequently, the interpretation of the architectural house varies and creates completely different expectations and conclusions.

Solely two parts are imposed within the context, first the “body” of the doorway that serves as a reinterpretation of the atrium, the place the journey into the chapel begins and the place little by little the “speaker” detaches from the surface setting. The opposite is a “cross” at floor stage on the sting of the void, which reinterprets a cenote, and is pierced in precast concrete slabs that enable the vocation of house to be recognized from afar.

Robinson Adey

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