Church Saint Mary-Magdeleine / Mase / Valais / Switzerland / 1983-1985
Context
The existing church built in 1910 had important structural problems due to an inappropriate carpenter work and missing foundations just above an ancient cemetery. The tower parts were from different period since 17th century.
An architectural competition was organized to define the intervention type,
Concept – I love my Grandma with her wrinkles, please don’t lift her !
The intervention is based on a postulate: Architecture is the formal and meaningful expression of the history.
It proposes to recognize the cultural mutations and to affirm them according two typologies. After verifying the sites features to receive and give, the project will develop according the invariants (center and axe) and on the significant and witness relations of the building story then of the history.
the intervention can be defined as follow:
- Conservation of the sign: (memory)
- Introduction and expression of the modern liturgical space (concentric static) in the structure of the latin space: (linear dynamic).
This text observes, on one side, some general principle defining the design process and on another side of personal design interpretations. Daring this provocative title is I thing, pointing vulgar part of the restauratrice options of the current practice.
Architecture is the formal expression of the History
It involves that each period must be expressed by and with is built and natural environment ; this by the architectural intervention , without systematic subordination to supposed absolute values of the existing context. It is then interesting to define from the problematic and through a critical analysis, the meaning and the nature of those relations with the context. This analysis as well as the whole architecture process doesn’t operate in a linear vway, but also according the thought schemes through the successive project verifications and relations.
However it may be simply defined as follow:
the reading of the territory
the site, a built promontory, (socle) in the forefront of the village, dominating the val of Herens. The existing silhouette has a value as a sign, a landmark, the part of the wide landscape, important element of the memory: a watched/watcher position, appropriate to communicate far away.
the eyes of the history
the history is present as awareness. It doesn’t serve to deduct architectural forms, but to understand the evolution of the Christian space and its components…le centre and the axe. Combined since the roman basilicas and subordinated one to each other, along the the history of the religious architecture, generating by their properties so much meanings, they constitute and define two possible typologies of churches:
- the church with longitudinal plan.
- the church with central plan.
Once the the site features recognized and the axial/central typologies rediscovered, it’s from those invariants that the project will be made; excluding all barbaric shapes which would not be legitimate. We are then reducing to a defined case the infinite number of possibilities.
The conservation of the sign…It recognizes the physical, structural of the building belonging to the collective memory. It also recognizes the building effort and it’s particularly to recognize the longitudinal typology (the processional journey) as conditioning the actual experience of the religious practice. We observe then that the object it’s not the main interesting thing, but rather the essence of the relation between the parts, the semantic dialogue, the game of old and new relations, the intensity of the exchanges and the resulting emotions issues of the difficult balanced union. The project will become consistent by the material technologies for the form within the relations preliminarily defined. The materials, the textures, the light serve the relations. Assuming the cultural mutations by the container/content we recognize the building history instead of its historicity. It’s not here matter of progress on the past but rather another way for the history of architecture to exist in the present. So, at the time of the « re-plastering hysteria” and other epidermic treatments downgrading monuments, mummifying their memories, it’s legitimate to recognize architecture and history associating them, instead wasting desperately wasting their last chances.
Christian Beck in « nos monuments d’art et d’histoire » avril 1984