The Parish Centre of the Madrid town of Rivas Vaciamadrid is a singular building clad in Corten steel that, through its aggressive geometry, imposes its presence of the surroundings and boldly manifests its religious and representative character.
The narrow and elongated shape of the plot required a directional layout such as the one that has finally been built, even though, as the authors state, “we thought that these directional plans did not fit in with today’s liturgical requirements”. In order to resolve this drawback, and as part of the historical thought process, the architects take up Bernini’s idea in Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, where the ground plan is an ellipse where the smaller axis is the main one and the larger one the subordinate one, thus also forcing entry through the smaller axis and placing here the see, the ambo and the alter, thus concentrating all of the hierarchical density. A physically longitudinal space was thus turned into a centralised space.
In order to take maximum advantage of the built surface, a continuous building has been developed that unifies the dwellings of the priests and the parish centre with the church. The head of the building explodes in a set of roof lights that mark the exterior of the presbytery and become the characteristic image of the church, forming an altarpiece of great formal value. The construction is very simple: a metallic structure, Corten cladding and plasterboard panelling.
Finally, a series of artists have become involved in the project, giving their disinterested collaboration. José Manuel Ciria has painted the Chapel of the Most Holy, transforming it into a mural that represents the creation of the world, a work of heroic yet subtle and nuance-filled expressionism, while Javier Viver, an artist specialising in video art, has produced images of the Virgin and of Saint Monica in a figurative style formed from a magma of cloths in torsion that recalls Bernini’s proposal for the beatified Ludovica Albertoni. The crucifix is the work of José Luis Sánchez, one of the sculptors who have done most for sacred art in Spain since the nineteen-fifties. The Way of the Cross is the work of José Antonio Ramos: fourteen steel crosses, each of them different, treated like painted bandages, and the striking Christ of the sacristy, the work of the sculptor Javier Martínez. Finally, the great main altar, the ambo, the see and the baptismal font have been painted by Fernando Pagola.
