The conditions imposed on Miguel Fisac for this project included a church and a convent where teacher parents, young theologians and students would all live together, each having a private and differentiated space, and converging only in the common areas and the classrooms and learning zones. To this particular program is added the peculiar preconditions of location: between the access to Madrid by the road of France and the Valdebebas stream, in an isolated area with a certain slope.
The answer given by Fisac is a set of pieces arranged orthogonally and ordered towards the bottom, locating the different pavilions in a hierarchical way: teacher parents in the first place, young parents in second and finally the students, who formed too the Chorus of the Theologate. These two first sections are where the main activities of the convent are carried out, embracing a common garden that invites contemplation.
The main element, which crowns the Set and breaks this organization is therefore the church. With this Fisac had to solve a very specific situation: get to locate around a single altar to the choir of the church and the parishioners, but separately. The final solution was to organize the plant around two branches of hyperbola symmetrically opposed to each other, which constrict the space in the central point where the altar is located. Thus, one side of it is occupied by up to 300 choristers, while the other serves 700 religious. The altarpiece itself, raised on seven steps and receiving a powerful overhead light from the roof, embraces a suspended Christ, made by the sculptor Pablo Serrano.
With this amount of resources a dynamic space is created, making everything flow towards the altar, turning it into the structuring piece of space. The route to it is interpreted as the way to Christ: access to the church is from a previous space and located on a side, dark, which aims to accustom the rest of the space and lead back to the light at the time of access to the main space. The secondary lighting is supported by vineyards located on the side walls, with shades that vary throughout the space, contribution in part by the artist Adolf Winterlich.
The exterior of the church and its surrounding area also deserve special mention: the brick and exposed concrete combined with the stained glass windows are joined by a frieze carved in stone by the sculptress Susana Polack. Together with the church and on its closest side to the road, we are surprised by a concrete tower crowned with a "tangled" prism based on bent steel bars, housing inside a neon cross that can be seen at night, all this work of the own Fisac. This tower is the great milestone of the Set, visible from the road and acting as a claim to the church.
In this work, Fisac responds in an opposite way to the imposed needs: with the dynamism that it already investigated in the previous work for the Dominican Fathers in Valladolid and with the will to concentrate the tensions and the expressiveness in the representative places, while the rest of the set is governed by an orthogonal rationality.
The answer given by Fisac is a set of pieces arranged orthogonally and ordered towards the bottom, locating the different pavilions in a hierarchical way: teacher parents in the first place, young parents in second and finally the students, who formed too the Chorus of the Theologate. These two first sections are where the main activities of the convent are carried out, embracing a common garden that invites contemplation.
The main element, which crowns the Set and breaks this organization is therefore the church. With this Fisac had to solve a very specific situation: get to locate around a single altar to the choir of the church and the parishioners, but separately. The final solution was to organize the plant around two branches of hyperbola symmetrically opposed to each other, which constrict the space in the central point where the altar is located. Thus, one side of it is occupied by up to 300 choristers, while the other serves 700 religious. The altarpiece itself, raised on seven steps and receiving a powerful overhead light from the roof, embraces a suspended Christ, made by the sculptor Pablo Serrano.
With this amount of resources a dynamic space is created, making everything flow towards the altar, turning it into the structuring piece of space. The route to it is interpreted as the way to Christ: access to the church is from a previous space and located on a side, dark, which aims to accustom the rest of the space and lead back to the light at the time of access to the main space. The secondary lighting is supported by vineyards located on the side walls, with shades that vary throughout the space, contribution in part by the artist Adolf Winterlich.
The exterior of the church and its surrounding area also deserve special mention: the brick and exposed concrete combined with the stained glass windows are joined by a frieze carved in stone by the sculptress Susana Polack. Together with the church and on its closest side to the road, we are surprised by a concrete tower crowned with a "tangled" prism based on bent steel bars, housing inside a neon cross that can be seen at night, all this work of the own Fisac. This tower is the great milestone of the Set, visible from the road and acting as a claim to the church.
In this work, Fisac responds in an opposite way to the imposed needs: with the dynamism that it already investigated in the previous work for the Dominican Fathers in Valladolid and with the will to concentrate the tensions and the expressiveness in the representative places, while the rest of the set is governed by an orthogonal rationality.
