Parish church in Lublin

The crisis of sacred architecture is a crisis of relationships. The answer to the problem should be an architecture designed in the spirit of the greatest commandment of love, a space oriented towards forming relationships with God, with others and with nature. Architecture of relationships is to be a space of care, open to everyone.

The crisis of sacred architecture may be understood as a crisis of relationships, so in the process of design the idea of man's relationship with God, with others and with the natural environment was taken as a criterion. For building relationships, sacred architecture chooses to listen attentively. That is why the architecture of relationships, through its form, emphasises what it has already found in the space and recognised as a found 'treasure'. \r\nThe diploma project comprising a temple, a parish house and a vicarage was located on an attractive natural site in the northern part of the city, in the vicinity of residential housing development. The temple has a form of multiple units of successively receding levels and increases its height gradually to be human in scale. The arcades are reinterpretation of traditional forms in architecture of wooden churches in Poland and express architectonic gesture of care and welcome. Tent-shape roof is reinterpretation form of biblical Tent of Meeting as a place of relationship with God. Various prayer and meditation spaces have been designed to express the dynamism of relation. The architecture of the parish house and the vicarage has been formed into two ‘arms’, which embrace the existing forest. \r\nThe way in which buildings are situated in the space has made it possible to preserve much of the existing, spontaneously forming greenery, including the protected trees, while the introduction of the ‘open wall’ has made it possible to create intimate sacred spaces in the form of urban rooms and garden interiors. The relationship of unity between designed buildings was expressed not only in the way they were situated, but also in the materials used. Handmade facade bricks and coloured concrete form the common 'garment' of the architectural ensemble.