Porsgrunn Church
The new Church replaces the old Porsgrunn church which was lost in a fire in 2011. The new Church is a "Resurrection Church" that, through light, seeks optimism and new belief in the future after the fatal fire. Based on the local industrial history, of producing porcelain in Porsgrunn, the new church is built in white porcelain that links it to the city's local history. The church’s geometries seek something universal, timeless, eternal, and to create dialogue with the old cemetery's burial monuments designed as archaic obelisks. The building is structured by dense main volumes that appear as closed missives. The volumes of the Church are drawn apart, allowing daylight to come in between them. The Church highlights its constructive beams, in the ceiling, as a visual expression of the earthly and the physics that rules the existence. Daylight is spread across the surfaces of the Church interior as a spiritual expression. The Church’s choir is decorated with a porcelain relief of an angel entering the Church room. A skylight illuminates the choir, and the relief, and places the sacred actions in illuminated focus in the church room.
The construction of Porsgrunn Church represents a several years long, and unique process. Contractors and crafts men have been able to build all the details in the architect drawings for the project with millimetre precision in a way that is unusual in Norway today.
Porsgrunn Church seeks to unite the architectural history, of the classic church, with the modern social Scandinavian “working-Church”. It is made to be suited for the great markings of life, but also for daily community-oriented purposes. The project seeks to explore what the Church building should be for man in our time and our society.
