Brief
Tamkang Church in New Taipei City, Taiwan, meets in an 11-story concrete building with a roof featuring sharp angles. The roof has cross-shaped skylights that provide light for baptisms and other events.
Insight
German practice Behet Bondzio Lin Architekten has completed a church and social welfare centre in New Taipei City, Taiwan, housed in a high-rise concrete block topped with an angular roof.
Rather than adopting the typical symbols of a church building, the 11-storey building is instead informed by the new residential towers being built around it. Cruciform skylights in its roof and a cruciform window are the only visual clues to its purpose.
“This building is sitting in a new urban settlement so is expecting to have 200,000 living units grow next to it within the next ten years,” project designer Rodrigo Reverte told Dezeen.
“The building is one of the first built on this new development, so in religious terms, it was thought of as a limelight for people to come to, with its cross-shaped lit roof,” he continued.Across its 11 storeys, the building houses events spaces, lecture halls, congregation areas, classrooms and welfare spaces stacked atop one another and connected by staircases and lifts at the tower’s corners.
“The architecture of cathedrals often uses the cruciform shape as the main element to organise its space,” said the practice.”The design concept of the Tamkang Church is also based on the cross, but in the broader sense…it interweaves people’s lives through the church celebration and their daily life, and brings nature into the city life,” it continued.
Recent Comments