Materials and workforce are loaclly sourced. The building uses stones recovered from an old road, and bricks taken from an existing house on the premises. They used the foundations of the old house, and construction work was carried out by local farmers.
The result is an open air chapel that truly belongs to the site as it was conceived from the wishes and the work of the local people, and using the site's materials.
Description of project by Messina-Rivas Arquitetos
The Ingá-mirim Chapel is located in the vicinity of the city of Itupeva, 80km from São Paulo, on a nineteenth century farm. We were asked to reform the old local colony so as to transform it into an environment that responds to local celebrations of religious significance.
We understand the idea of architecture reform as an opportunity to reinterpret pre-existing construction, allowing for new relationships between the project and the landscape. For this, as an act of reflection, in the design of the ingá-mirim chapel we decided to disarm the materials of the old colony in order to reuse them and endow them with a new condition.
The construction was carried out together with the farm workers, the brothers Carlos and Charles, who used to work in construction and now do the work of local preservation. With them we tried the best we could, through their own knowledge, reuse the materials of old local constructions. Under these conditions, the constructive process accompanies the times of everyday activities such as cutting grass, releasing the horses or feeding the oxen.
By using the foundation of the pre-existing construction, the project is oriented from three walls built with stones from the old road that allowed access to the farm. Between these three walls, the taken apart bricks of the colony define a path that leads us through spaces that seek a continuity between the construction and the landscape suggesting, therefore, an open religious usufruct.
