The Best of Contemporary Religious Architecture
Meiso no Mori Municipal Funeral Hall
Pritzker Prize winner Toyo Ito’s 2006 crematorium features a curvaceous concrete roof set atop 12 columns. The funeral hall, whose name means 'forest of meditation,' overlooks a placid lake in the mountains of Japan's Gifu region.
Church of Water and Light
On South Korea’s Jeju Island, the steel-frame, timber-clad Church of Water and Light designed by Itami Jun Architects in 2009 seems to rise up from its surrounding water feature. Christian iconography is subtly embedded in this elevation, which comes at the end of a low-slung building.
Bruder Klaus Field Chapel
For a German farming couple who wanted to pay tribute to a 15th-century ascetic, Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architect Peter Zumthor designed the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel. Appropriately minimalist, the concrete chapel’s interior is lined with charred timber and a cast-lead floor. Lighting is provided solely through an unglazed roof opening and glass beads that were embedded in the irregular pentagon’s walls.
Islamic Cemetery
In recognition of Austria’s Muslim population, the municipality of Altach commissioned Bernardo Bader Architects to create an Islamic cemetery that features this decorative oak screen, completed in 2012, along its principal elevation.
dam-images-daily-2015-04-sacred-places-sacred-spaces-book-07.jpg
James Pallister’s Sacred Spaces: Contemporary Religious Architecture ( Phaidon , $70) was published this month.
Jewish Community Centre
Author James Pallister recognizes the historical significance of this Jewish Community Centre, Synagogue and Museum completed in Munich in 2007 by Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch. As the “first monumental freestanding synagogue built in Germany since the 1920s,” he observes, the heavily grounded volumes, clad in rough and polished travertine, suggest both resilience and permanence in the wake of the Holocaust".
Pilgrim Route Shelters
Each year during Holy Week, millions of people trek 72 miles through the Mexican state of Jalisco to pay tribute to the Virgin of Talpa. To provide the pilgrims with shelter and to memorialize landmarks along the way, high-profile architects have been commissioned to design way stations for the faithful. This modular adobe shelter designed by architect Luis Aldrete and completed in 2010, is one of a pair that can be expanded as usage demands.