Description

Founded in the seventies as a suburb on the northern periphery of Madrid, Tres Cantos today has almost 40,000 inhabitants. Like many modern satellite towns, this estate also suffers from problems of a lack of density and functional mix. The church stands on level ground on a tapering curving site. Half of the site serves as a garden and half is occupied by the church. The building makes no attempt to pay heed to its urban surroundings and gives no indication of its typology. It is therefore not exactly broken down into smaller distinguishable parts, nor is it particularly recognisable by symbols such as a tower or a nave.

From low down one sees a large concrete shape that, with its ups and downs, corners and edges, is like an abrupt range of white hills, dissociating itself from the long, red blocks of flats in the neighbourhood. From above, however, seen from the flats in the upper storeys of the residential blocks to the northwest and northeast, the object has the form of a hollow. The terraced formation falls from all sides in the direction of a walkway and a polygon with a tiny formal garden. An elongated rooflight denotes the part of the building intended for church services. Its apex runs along the eaves line of the gently curving external wall and rises to a high point like the peak of an iceberg 13.8 metres above the ground.

Coming from the garden, one is led into a forecourt from where, passing between the religious hall on the left hand side and the secular hall on the right, one reaches a glazed promenade leading from the northeast to the southwest deep within the building into a ‘rotunda’ and facing a ‘cloister’. The centre of this space, the aforementioned formal garden, is open to the sky. In the ‘cloister’, at the lower level, there is a series of ancillary rooms, notably the sacristy and offices, and above, three dwellings with a gallery overlooking the ‘rotunda’.

The plan of the hall, in which the churchgoers meet for services, is in the form of a segment. From the glass wall containing four double doors, the white ceiling sweeps upwards in a single, mighty gesture. The aforementioned rooflight widens out over the presbytery and, together with the full-height band of glass, produces on the smooth wall behind the altar, depending on the strength of the sun, an almost blazing background for the sculpture with the figures of Teresa of Avila and of Jesus of Nazareth. Following the curvature of the glass wall, the pews are arranged in an arc around the altar.

When the building was designed in the early eighties, the architect considered the revered “architettura della città” of the likes of Aldo Rossi to be a “mistake,” indeed an absolute “escapade”, particularly in a suburban context. Strangely, yet recognisably so, the Church of Santa Teresa de Jesús introduces a Finnish flavour into a Spanish context. The building is landscape, and in this respect it is reminiscent of some of the work of the Finnish architect Reima Pietilä.

The Architectural Review, no. 11/1995, pp. 52- | Architettura e spazio sacro nella modernità, exhibition catalogue, Milan 1992, p. 192, p. 296 | Arquitectura, no. 286/287/1990, pp. 138- | Baldellou, Miguel Angel, Capitel, Antón: Summa artis. Historia general del arte. Vol. XL Arquitectura española del siglo XX, Madrid 1996, pp. 600- | Campo Baeza, Alberto, Poisay, Charles (Ed.): Young Spanish Architecture, Madrid 1985, p. 142 | Capitel, Antón, Wang, Wilfried (Ed.): Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert. Spanien, exhibition catalogue, Munich 2000, p. 254 | Chiesa Oggi, no. 15/1995, pp. 58- | El Croquis, no. 0/1982, pp. 20- and no. 46/1991, advert p. 5, pp. 132- | Kunst und Kirche, no. 1/2002, pp. 14- | On Diseño, no. 127/1991, pp. 140- | Rispa, Raúl (Ed.): Birkhäuser Architekturführer. Spanien. 1920-1999, Basel 1998, p. 284 | Stock, Wolfgang Jean (Ed.): European Church Architecture 1950-2000, Munich 2002, pp. 196- | Stock, Wolfgang Jean: Architectural Guide Sacred Buildings in Europe since 1950, Munich 2004, pp. 256-

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.