Description

Many old churches in Portugal maintain their distance­ from their surroundings behind retaining walls, flights of steps and forecourts. This same strategy has been adopted for the Santa Maria Church in Marco de Canaveses. Making use of the sloping site, the building stands on a 4 metre high plateau. Together with rooms for the parish and the priest’s residence, the church will form an “acropolis” that turns its back on the noisy road, presenting a closed façade to the northeast and southeast and opening out gradually towards the northwest and southwest.

Those approaching from below must first walk around the elevated forecourt behind the retaining wall and the entrance to the funeral chapel on the right and proceed on across the car park before ascending a flight of stairs that lead one away from the church. Only after turning back on oneself does one reach the front of the building, a perfect square of 17.5 by 17.5 metres. The centre portion is indented, producing the impression of two tall “towers” to the left and right of the entrance portal, which at 3 metres wide and 10 metres high is of truly impressive stature.

In the interior, the lower portion of the walls is covered with Azulejos, the colour of the tiles varying between white and yellow. As one walks up the aisle, the naturally lit interior changes progressively from a static to an animated space. This is to a large extent due to the northwest wall, which bulges inwards increasingly towards the top. Although its weighty appearance is an illusion evoked by curved plasterboarding within the interior of the church, its curve draws one further into the room towards the marble altar, the brass tabernacle and oak sedilia. Behind the low podium, the rear wall is indented on each side with quarter-cylindrical indentations in the corners which, like convex “apses”, provide a hint of three naves.

Aside from the few light sources on the southwest side – the huge oak double doors, open only on Sundays, or the font in the left-hand “tower”, or the lobby behind the weekday entrance in the right “tower” – there are three points from which light illuminates the interior: firstly, three windows high up in the northwest wall, secondly a 16 metre long and 50 centimetre wide strip low down in the southeast wall, and, thirdly, two bright upright openings directly behind the altar. The latter are lit by a walled chamber that projects on the outside of the building and also allows lights into the funeral chapel in the floor below beneath the altar.

The building’s outward appearance is reminiscent of twenties or thirties modernism: clean, smooth, white and light. But unlike so many modernist buildings, it is firmly rooted, standing squarely on its plinth, like a bastion defiant in the face of its surroundings. The architecture of the Santa Maria Church is paradoxical in other respects, too: in one and the same form it is both classical and baroque, stoic but also vigorous.

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