During Bogotá’s pandemic, the senior community of the Alhambra neighborhood was isolated during the most critical catholic dates of the year, the holy week celebrations. As such, a multidisciplinary team collaborated to donate a prayer space for the local community.
Project Name: Alhambra’s Cross
Studio Name: alsar atelier
Location: Colombia
Site Area: 5000 sq. m.
Built Up Area: 300 sq. m
Status: Built
Image Credits: Alberto Roa
The project, born from economic precarity, ingeniously crafts a transient chapel using recycled materials. The design reshapes the horizontal formwork system, melding modularity and sacred architecture to accommodate 80 seniors in 300 sqm for just four days.
The design seamlessly transformed a parking lot into a chapel, having full occupancy during the easter ceremonies, restoring leisure for the Alhambra senior community during isolation, and rendering an exemplary experiment of the value behind low-cost tectonics.
In March 2020, the citizens of Bogotá saw themselves facing the upcoming Holy Week celebrations in pandemic isolation. While usually not considered an issue of importance due to the socio-cultural significance of the catholic faith within the Latin American context, the senior community of the Alhambra Neighborhood saw this as an adverse restriction on their routines.
For elderly citizens, routinely attending mass is not only a matter of faith but also of socialization with their community and strengthening their mental health. As such, the community and the local church had started to take over a grocery store parking lot to conduct masses with nothing more than plastic chairs and a megaphone.
As Holy Week is when the most important yearly catholic celebrations take place, Alsar-Atelier, in collaboration with German Bahamon and the Colombian Society of Architects, approached the senior community of the Alhambra neighborhood with the intent of donating an open-air temporary chapel.
The main objective of the design was to help senior citizens adapt to the pandemic reality without restricting their leisure, especially in times of isolation. As the project came to fruition, the design team asked the grocery store parking lot owners if it was possible to use their space to install a temporary prayer space. They responded that they were only willing to donate a portion of their area for said chapel for only four days, leading to a condition of acute ephemerality that was crucial in defining the proposal.
Additionally, the project needed to host a community of 80 senior citizens under a minimum of 300 sqm and reference elements of classical catholic architecture within the final composition, per request of the clients, with essentially no funds to finance the project.
These seemingly impossible project conditions led to the reuse of the horizontal formwork system, the rudimentary modular structures used to cast concrete slabs in the global south. The process needed to cast concrete slabs requires the creation of a large inhabitable structure with quick assembly and disassembly, making said system an ideal compositional material for the chapel’s design, as it shared the same conditions of ephemerality and economic accessibility. At this point in the process, Equinorte S.A.S, a company that loans out construction infrastructure, joined the team and agreed to donate the material needed to construct the design.
