'Church for our time' wins international award

The designs of a church by Richard England that might eventually be built at Hal-Farrug and conceptual designs of a chapel looking towards Filfla last week won the Grand Prix award at the International Academy of Architecture at Interarch in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The designs were chosen from among 200 entries from 15 countries.

The designs for the Hal-Farrug church are the ones that will eventually be presented to the Malta Environment and Planning Authority. Prof. England said the church "has been conceived primarily as a church for our time; a composite structure based on a geometry of rotations, inclinations, oscillations and fluctuations.

"This apparent anti-order of forms may be read as a reflection of not only the current overall general global agitation but also of the present turbulence and difficulties being encountered today by the Catholic Church itself as an institution.

"The dark inclined entrance tunnel provides the visitor with a 'rite of passage' transition from external secular space to internal sacred space. One cannot approach a sacred space casually!

"The tunnel entrance is therefore conceived as a pathway that prepares the churchgoers, a profane shadowland threshold which opens at its end to the exuberant illuminated light well of the church interior. For internally the church is washed and bathed in light, a light clothed arena which attempts, with its inclined cylindrical masses, to manifest in architectural terms Pope John Paul II's requisites for sacred spaces as laid out in his Letter to Artists: 'the functional must be wedded to the creative impulse, yet always inspired by a sense of the beautiful together with an intuition of mystery'.

"The function of the church today is to bring people forward to meet God in a space where man's spirit is rejuvenated. We must not forget that despite the fact that our current age has provided great and significant strides in the field of scientific knowledge and communications, man still today knows least about what matters most. The interior also incorporates a meditation chapel and baptistery both also conceived as top-lit inclined and convoluted cylinders," Prof. England said.

The subterranean chapel looking at Filfla is constructed by burrowing into the rock and producing a window which looks out over the waters focusing on the small island.

"From the seaside, the chapel assumes a different scale. Superimposed over the diminutive opening is an oversized cross, illuminated at night, scaled to relate to the magnitude of the towering overpowering cliff face. After sunset the two access towers housing lift and stairs to the chapel level are also lit up in order to appear from a distance as invitational beacon-candles framing the top edge of the vertical arm of the cross," Prof. England said.

In a poetic-religious vein, Prof. England explained the setting in his mind's eye: "One sits on the rock-cut steps within this man-made cavern silently in prayer with a meditational eye looking out to the isle hovering between the womb of the earth and the navel of the sea, between the not yet and the no longer, as the wind dances on the silver surface of the ever-changing sea in a silent hymn of spiritual exhilaration.

"The site retains its hallowed sanctity as a mystical place of veneration in a transformation into what will hopefully become a contemporary Mediterranean altar of truce for this turbulent arena of violence... a sanctuary of peace tied to the sky, bound to the sea and chained to the earth, balanced between remembrance and desire," he mused.

Prof. England's works will feature in an exhibition at the headquarters of Flash Art magazine in Trevi, Italy in March next year.