Iglesia Nuestra Señora de La Estrella


1962
Bogotá, Colombia
Juvenal Moya Cadena
On an overcast day, Emerson and I are walking around the eastern hills of Bogotá. We are in the neighbourhood of La Merced, where I am intrigued by a row of stately Victorian-looking tudor houses. A Google search tells me they were built by the British Petroleum Company for employees in the mid-20th century. We continue east, up the hill, where the street climbs to meet a dramatic church.


The roof structure of the church is made of two soaring concrete vaults, which intersect at 90 degrees. The vaults are remarkably thin, they seem to drape like fabric. The church is named Iglesia Nuestra Señora de la Estrella (Our Lady of the Star), and it is one of several thin-shelled concrete churches built across Bogotá by Juvenal Moya Cadena. Organic-form concrete structures were embraced by the Latin American modern movement, where lower labor costs allowed for the construction of highly intricate, labor-intensive formwork. This type of construction is something of a dinosaur, hardly compatible with today’s risk-averse construction industry. In Iglesia Nuestra, the impression of the formwork is still visible, down to the grain of the wood. Inside the church, there is a spiral staircase, leading to a small mezzanine, all cast made from the same concrete as the roof. The whole church seems to have been carved from a giant block.


Construction of The Capilla de los Santos Apostoles, Bogotá (1956)






Le Merced, Bogotá





 
made with cargo.site