TY - CPAPER TI - Christ of silence’s Chapel (Palmela, Portugal) T2 - Arquitecturas da Alma AU - Miranda, Bernardo Pizarro PY - 2017 CY - LIsbond UR - https://www.dinamiacet.iscte-iul.pt/arquiteturas-da-alma AB - From the proposed premiminary program we stress the wish to turn an inoperative electric power transformation station into a space for quietness and silence, available to the local community and to support the pastoral activities offered by the religious commutity that integrates it. A parallelepiped volume of 25 square meters, and 4 meters high inside, constitutes the basis and opportunity to regenerate a devitalized space. We seeked the envolving shape, unified around the altar, confering once more tangibility to the profound reforms of the II Vatican Council. We proposed to reorganize the interior space of the old technical area, filtering the exterior light and covering the walls of white… A larch wooden stool embraces the area, calling the identity of a community assembled around the altar. The renewed interior space, spotted by an iconographic image, searches the echoes of the ongoing creation in the emptiness and inner silence. The reconfigured exterior shape, with its character of a private space, holds the designation of a new time, the time for a new temple. Outside, a structure of iron and zinc wire will lead the growth of the final covering with a deciduous climbing plant, confering a new identity to the primitive volume. The exterior final covering, in Japanese creeper, looks for, in the seasons of the year and in the Biblical metaphore of “the wine-dresser”, the universal dimension of the Church. ER -