Oratory Chapel
Oratory Chapel is a small chapel in a big garden, a new reading of a pre-existed work that has been demolished and reused to build this new one.
A pair of reinforced concrete walls of 8 cm of thickness, of variable height diagonally, hold up a slab of 6.5 cm, forming a kind of tunnel. A modulation of 30.5 cm in its formwork. The holes of the wall´s constructive system left without filling in allow light and air to filter in through those new walls. The height in one of its ends is enough to access the space formed between these constructive elements.
A bench made of assembled wood lies atop a pavement of crushed red brick.
In the lower end of the piece, a geometric ironwork forms a cross of metallic profiles that confine the space. This metal piece, along with the crushed brick material, the steel bars for the reinforcement of the walls, and the existing foundation, once belonged to a previous work constructed in the very same site, in the same scale and in the same orientation. That chapel of 1200 pieces of brick masonry.
In a sense, the new work dialogues with the memory of the old work and nurtures itself of the materials of past times to become part of the architecture that now exists in the present.
Perhaps in the future, the information of both works overlapped will feed another variation of this small chapel located in the great garden of the grandmother´s “quinta” at the village of Santiago, Nuevo Leon, where one past architecture has made this new one.
