Description

The location of the buildings on the campus of the Catholic University of Seattle is determined by the rigid grid pattern of the roads. The chapel sits on a quadrangle in this grid. The orthogonal footprint of the building covers an area of 35.5 by 15.9 metres, its long side pointing exactly east-west, its short side north-south. In front of the building, which one approaches from the south, lie a shallow pool and the bell tower, a high concrete stele that holds aloft the sign of the cross.

The architect has described the volume of the building as “bottles of light in a stone box”. The chapel is enclosed by slabs of wall cast on-site. The exterior of the panels has been stained in light ochre and the holes used for craning the panels into place are capped with bronze stoppers. Steel beams, curved precisely using magnetic induction, form the arched roof forms of the six vaults; zinc panels cover the dynamic roofscape.

The programme of the church is complex. Each function and each ritual correspond to a vaulted-over space, one of the larger or smaller, shallow or steeply curving volumes that arc out of the roof. The ribbon containing the sacristy, the wedding chamber and a separate confessional box occupy almost half of the east side. A narrow “processional route” begins outside on the forecourt and runs along the wall of the west side to the font made of cedar wood. The axis ends at the sacrament chapel, whose walls are treated with beeswax. The onyx tabernacle stands in front of this. The main central space opens out to the right of this processional axis and encompasses several areas, the entrance lobby, the congregation and areas for the priests and the musicians.

The chapel is illuminated almost exclusively from above. In the rough-plastered white interior, light streams out from behind baffles that are suspended slightly offset in front of the glass roof lights and blend into the walls. The sun shines onto coloured fields painted onto the reverse side of these baffles, which are concealed from view. From inside the chapel one can only see the slots at the edges of the baffles, which appear as strips and glances of light that scatter a halo of colour gently over the surrounding walls. Coloured lenses operate as a counterpart to the larger strips and surfaces of colour; yellow and green serve as a counterpart to red and blue. In this way, each of the six “vessels” has its own play of colour.

More so than its references to the oeuvre of Alvar Aalto, and even more than its exquisite materiality and advanced construction, it is the diffuse character of the space and light that makes the sometimes darker sometimes lighter interior a place of spiritual movement. The design is based on the ideas and concepts of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. A preoccupation of the Spanish saint was apparently the ability to master spiritual life through the study of space and light.

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