GOAL
Design a place of worship in London.
TWIST
In addition to the actual place of worship, the design proposal should include a component dedicated to informing and educating people who are interested in knowing more about that specific religion. Whether this component is part of the overall structure or a freestanding object – or concept – should be decided by the participant.
A place of worship.
God is love. Meeting him means to realize this love that surrounds us, follow us and reach us simultaneously from everywhere and everything. After this discovery the reality becomes transparent in order to reveal us who is behind everything.
God’s love is provident. How and when someone can discover this love depends on two conditions at last: God’s providence that hatches the opportunity and the freedom of the human being to consent.
A place of information
Catholic doctrine is based on what God’s said along the History through his Word and through what’s been passed on by Tradition. It’s based on logical reasoning and consequences deriving from this divine auto-revelation too.
He is free to show himself to the human being via doctrine or getting by without it. Knowledge of doctrine is not absolutely necessary to reach God. Neither God’s knowledge is necessary the end of an only intellectual knowledge of doctrine. Nevertheless, for twenty centuries, Catholic Church has worked hard to distinguish, fix, understand and explain with words and reasons, making understandable for everyone the knowledge that she has of God. And that’s good.
Doctrine clarifies concepts, distinguishes aspects and carries us from a reasoning to another, from a principle to another, from a dogma to another. But it does it in a fragmentary way, without cover the whole God. Doctrine by itself can’t give us a complete, total, simultaneous and personal vision of God’s love. However, it may be a gate for it, if God wants.
Both buildings, the floating one and the platform one, the simultaneous one and the sequencial one, are made of stainless steel 20 mm sheet that takes on resistant and closing tasks.
All openings are protected with ultra-diffusion glass.
Sacred sculptures of Christ in this proposal are works of Javier Margait Boscà.
Sacred sculpture of Our Lady is a work of Javier Viver. Both are Spanish artists.
Winners of the competition here.
José Ángel Nieto García. 