ARCHITECT

LINAZASORO & SÁNCHEZ ARQUITECTURA

PROJECT

EXTENSION OF SAN LORENZO CHURCH IN VALDEMAQUEDA 2001

Valdemaqueda presents a small and scattered hamlet. In an upper area of the village, a great prismatic apse shows the location of the International Gothic temple which dominated the village until its destruction in the 1940s. The only remains -a Renaissance door and the apse- have been included in the construction of the new temple. The temple’s bare wall architecture is the austere legacy of Pre-Romanesque and Cistercian examples. The new nave is housed in a building of cubic geometry, presented again on the roof with roof light openings that give view to the different inner areas.


As an objet trouvé,the old church door is superimposed on he double-sheet brick walls of the partitions, completing a construction approach where texture predominates over ornaments. The access, which is out of the axis of symmetry of the church, is now presented as the starting point of a processional route to the altar, guided by the elements associated to each liturgy moment. The construction supports the asymmetry of the route with its elements, following the floor’s slope. A holy water font carved on a granite block has the only window with a view to the outside on the western section, right in front of the baptismal font facing the entrance. The latter is found under the roof light opening along the nave’s northern side which illuminates with low-level light the wall where the confessional booth is located. A higher second roof light opening taking up the whole breadth of the church overhangs from the roof where the apse and the nave meet. Its big lintel is seen as an inner visual diagram that plays the same role tas the iconostasis in eastern churches. Its transversal light border is right before the dark section of the existing apse, in which the faint brightness of the Renaissance altarpiece is noticeable.

source: Linazasoro & Sánchez Arquitectura