Bio-Based Materials Inform The Design Of This Wavelike Pavilion

A riverfront horticultural complex located in the south German city of Wangen im Allgäu, in the Alpine foothills, centers on a strikingly curvaceous pavilion. Hybrid Flax Pavilion, the 4,090-square-foot structure, which serves as an exhibition hall for the region’s local garden show, or landesgartenschau, was a collaborative effort between two University of Stuttgart institutes and the school’s Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (aka IntCDC), which leverages cross-disciplinary research to innovate digitally driven building and fabrication methods—in this case, the pavilion’s roof.

To create the wavelike element, the team piloted a hybrid system that utilizes bio-based materials and cutting-edge technologies, resulting in a unique take on regenerative design. Supported by the facade’s steel structure, thin plates of cross-laminated timber are reinforced with filament derived from flax, a fiber historically processed by the region’s textile industry. (In fact, the town’s old flax-spinning mill was renovated as part of the complex.) The gray-brown filament was wound via robotic arms around screws bolted into the edges of the CNC-milled plates, which are just 4.7 inches thick—much thinner than typical CLT beams hewn from old-growth timber, and thus enabling use of younger trees and locally available reserves.

How Two University Of Stuttgart Institutes Created Hybrid Flax Pavilion

Leveraging the properties of both materials yielded a lightweight structure with enhanced performance. The flax-fiber weave primarily bears tension loads and shear forces, while the wood panels manage compression forces directed to the steel columns. Together, they provide the strength and stiffness necessary to bear the area’s heavy snow loads. The hybrid system, says architect and IntCDC senior researcher Monika Göbel, “creates a flat, stable building envelope, even though the roof looks dynamic and round.”

The circular glass facade beckons visitors into the column-free space from all directions and promotes an indoor/outdoor connection, while the curved roofline, intentionally echoing the rhythm of the nearby Argen River, creates interior zones of varying heights. In the center of the donut-shaped pavilion is a climate garden, which invites cross-ventilation and evaporative cooling in warmer months when the doors are open. The floor slab, made from recycled concrete and carbon-reduced cement, is part of a geothermal system programmed to maintain a comfortable indoor air temperature year-round.

Walk Through This Wavelike Pavilion In Germany

PROJECT SOURCES THROUGHOUT HA-CO CARBON: FIBER FABRICATION. STERK ABBUNDZENTRUM: WOOD ROOF. FOWATEC: GLASS FACADE. BIEDENKAPP STAHLBAU: STEEL. HARALD KLEIN ERDBEWEGUNGEN: FOUNDATION, HEATING. ATELIER BRÜCKNER: CUSTOM FURNITURE. BELZNER HOLMES LIGHT-DESIGN; BIB CONCEPT; COLLINS+KNIEPS VERMESSUNGSINGENIEURE; MORÄNE; SPEKTRUM BAUPHYSIK & BAUÖKOLOGIE; WEBER BONEBERG MEROTH BERATENDE INGENIEURE; LOHRER.HOCHREIN: ENGINEERS. ARGE-LEISTUNGSBEREICH WÄRMEVERSORGUNGS-UND MITTELSPANNANLAGEN FRANZ MILLER OHG; STAUBER + STEIB: CONSTRUCTION.

Discover The Baroque Center Documenting Dresden’s Wartime History

Invisible Cities, the 1972 book, is a popular read among architects, particularly Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano. But for their competition entry to design Archiv der Avantgarden–Egidio Marzona (ADA), a new museum of 20th-century avant-garde art inside an existing Dresden, Germany, structure, the Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos founders referenced a lesser-known work by Italian author Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, in which he wrote, “We would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.” That musing on opposing forces and the necessary balance between them became the metaphor not only for Nieto Sobejano’s winning ADA bid but also the resulting, thoroughly reimagined building.

Occupying an 18th-century former guard house, known locally as the Blockhaus, for the wooden structure that previously occupied the site, the ADA is part exhibition space, part research center—the basis of its collection, more than 1 million objects, donated by collector Marzona—and part gift to residents of Dresden, which is still undergoing reconstruction from the World War II bombings that leveled it. In fact, the Blockhaus was completely gutted in a 1945 air raid.

Nieto and Sobejano, who established their firm in Madrid in 1985, are known for using architecture to channel history and memory and masters of adaptive reuse. At the ADA, they’ve advanced their approach by focusing “only on an essential idea that is capable of transforming into a dense and complex interior,” Nieto begins. The core challenge was how to insert a modern museum into a building with a protected facade that couldn’t be touched. The constraint turned out to be creatively invigorating. “Perhaps the most important lesson is to restrain the desire to leave an unnecessary mark on the exterior and focus the project on its interior through a clear generative idea,” she adds.

Calvino’s theory on the duality of lightness and weight comes into focus as visitors pass through the facade’s restored double-height stone arches into an extremely minimalist interior of mostly board-formed concrete, its 30,000 square feet composed of an open-plan gallery on the ground level and a three-story cube containing the climate-controlled archive seemingly levitating overhead; Nieto Sobejano suspended the cube from a structure hidden in the walls and roof. “It’s like an umbrella hangs from above,” Sobejano notes. “The modern movement during the 20th century said architecture should be very sincere,” he continues. “If you have a column, show the column. But sometimes it’s better to hide it and create an illusion.” A sculptural spiral staircase leads to a study center and staff offices upstairs and a restaurant on the lower level.

The result embodies the sought-after paradox: a baroque shell with a pared-down interior, a gravity-defying concrete form with no apparent support structure, and an exhibition space that can morph to accommodate what’s needed that day, from art displays to movie screenings. The effect is sublime. It serves as a visual allegory for the ADA’s collection of paintings, books, drawings, manuscripts, and objects from such movements as Surrealism and Dada, Arte Povera and the Bauhaus that represented sharp breaks from the past.

“Projects that are transformations, modifications, extensions, refurbishments, and adaptations of existing buildings become interesting architectural questions,” Sobejano states. “It’s not only a stylistic or sustainability question. It’s also how to establish a dialogue between the existing and the new.” While this is a common challenge with adaptive reuse projects writ large, at the ADA, it became “very contradictory,” Sobejano adds, “because the 20th-century avant-garde was meant to be a transgression of everything that existed before. . . The weight of history, as opposed to the blindness, let’s call it, of the avant-garde, had to be expressed in the architecture.”

The interplay of lightness and weight, enclosure and openness also stemmed from how ADA director Rudolf Fischer envisioned the project fitting in with the cultural landscape of Dresden. While the U.S. treats museums as temples to fine art, Germany views them as communal living rooms where people can come to socialize and stay as long as they’d like. Fischer wanted the architecture to telegraph that idea with an inviting and accessible ground floor. “We tried to create a magic space that captures the emotions of people who visit,” Fischer notes. “The building is nice, but it’s beautiful with people inside.” But, the archive and research center, the latter featuring custom workstations and shelving units by German design firm Heine Lenz Zizka, are by appointment only, and visually enclosing them communicates this relationship to the public, too. “It’s an interesting exercise between the private and the public,” Sobejano says.

That the collection looms overhead is a reminder of the archive and its importance to the museum. It’s also an intervention to address the effects of climate change. The Blockhaus is on the banks of the Elbe River, which has been prone to flooding; one in 2013 damaged the building so severely, its electrical system was destroyed. Suspending the collection well above ground level to protect against potential water damage is as much practical as it is poetic. Sensitivity to sustainability extends to the exhibition design as well, with Fischer commissioning ecologically focused, Italian studio Formafantasma to conceive a reusable system of vitrines, gallery walls, and textile panels.

The ADA also represents a new chapter for Dresden. Most of the post-war development happened just outside the historic core, creating a new downtown. But in the past two decades, the city has focused its attention on restoring old buildings, bringing people back to its medieval heart. During the 1980’s, when Dresden was part of the German Democratic Republic, the Blockhaus was renovated into a diplomatic space that represented German-Soviet friendship. After unification, it became an office building. Now, the ADA serves not only as a conceptual and physical bridge between the old and new Dresden for locals but also a cultural draw for anyone interested in exploring its collection and its profound container.

Inside The Archiv der Avantgarden–Egidio Marzona

NIETO SOBEJANO ARQUITECTOS: PATRICIA GRANDE; JOHANNES HANF; KIRSTIE SMEATON; ROMAN BENDER; CLEMENS AHLGRIMM; LUCIA ANDREU; ANNA-LENA BERGER; MICHAŁ CIESIELSKI; LORNA HUGHES; VISSIA PORTIOLI; SEBASTIAN SAURE; INA SPECHT; KATHI WEBER; CLAUDIA WULF; JEAN-BENOIT HOUYET; ANASTASIA SVIRSKI. STUDIO HELEN STELTHOVE: GRAPHICS. WETZEL & VON SEHT: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER. BRENDEL INGENIEURE DRESDEN: MEP. BERGER BETON; HENTSCHKE BAU: CONCRETE WORK. FB-TECHNIK SCHELER: GENERAL CONTRACTOR.

FROM FRONT CREATON: ROOF TILE (EXTERIOR). GRAICHEN BAU- UND MÖBELWERKSTÄTTEN: CUSTOM SHELVING (STUDY CENTER). THROUGHOUT ERCO: TRACK SPOTLIGHTS. RHEODUR: FLOORING. UNITEX: ACOUSTIC CLADDING. THORANDT METALLBAU: CUSTOM DOORS. TISCHLEREI WAICSEK: CUSTOM WINDOWS.

Mass Studies Looks To The Void For London’s Latest Serpentine Pavilion

For two decades, London’s Serpentine Pavilion, the summer installation commissioned annually to a different architect, has drawn throngs of attendees—some 1 million in recent years. So it was particularly unusual that when Minsuk Cho visited in 2005, when Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura had designed it, he found himself totally alone with the structure, reflecting on the nature of that particular public space. “It offered a spectrum of experiences,” the architect recalls thinking, “from quiet introspection to exhilarating collective moments.”

That was two years after Cho had founded his firm, Mass Studies, in his hometown of Seoul, South Korea. And it’s now that his Archipelagic Void is the Serpentine Pavilion 2024, providing its own range of experiences via a starlike structure with a 26-foot-diameter empty space at its center. Radiating off it are five semi-enclosed structures, or “islands,” in locally sourced Douglas fir, each a different shape and hub for activity—the diversity making Cho’s creation unique from previous, which typically were one distinct atmosphere. “This is more like a cinematic montage,” he says. There’s climbable netting in the Play Tower; a Tea House, referencing the adjacent Serpentine Gallery’s original use; and the Gallery, with an immersive sound installation by musician and fellow South Korean Jang Young-Gyu.

In fact, it’s the courtyards of hanoks, traditional Korean homes, and their function as a gathering place that inspired Archipelagic Void’s open-air core. “It’s an inversion of the usual configuration,” Cho explains—and his contribution to the shared spaces that are so essential to urban fabric. 

Sustainability Spotlight: The Biennale Architettura in Venice

Earlier this year, Interior Design offered an inside look at the 18th Biennale Architettura, in Venice, Italy, rounding up eight must-see installations centered around architectural impact on power structures and social systems. But there’s even more to see. Take a look at these show-stopping pavilions, which spotlight environmental issues and show how designers are paving a more sustainable path forward.

12 Impactful Installations from the 18th Biennale Architettura

Rowland + Broughton

Redefining Beauty is an image of the dry Colorado River Delta by National Geographic photographer Peter McBride on reflective steel panels inside the site’s European Cultural Centre.

Olalekan Jeyifous

For the Nigeria pavilion, ACE/AAP imagines a multimedia departure lounge for a fictional transportation company, a prototypical transport hub for low-impact, zero-emission land, sea, and air travel.

Belgium

In Vivo, curated by Bento Architecture and University of Liège professor Vinciane Despret, presents alternative construction methods using living substances like raw earth and fungi in a contemplative setting.

Kingdom of Bahrain

Sweating Assets is an installation of micro-climates curated by architects Maryam Aljomairi and Latifa Alkhayat that suggests ecological reuse for condensation and examines past, present, and hypothetical future water use in the Kingdom.

Hood Design Studio

Examining the history of basket-making as it relates to a former plantation site in South Carolina, Sweet Grass Walk in the Carlo Scarpa Sculpture Garden features palmetto columns crafted from the same wood used for the mooring poles throughout Venice.

Serge Attukwei Clottey

Time and Chance is the Ghanaian artist’s patchwork tapestry of thousands of squares cut from plastic gallon containers, strung to­gether with wire, and suspended from the Gaggiandre shipyard.

Korea

At the heart of 2086: Together How?, curators Soik Jung and Kyong Park created a game show where audience participants make choices on questions of environmental crises as researched by architects and civic leaders from three small communities in South Korea.

MMA Design Studio

Origins, a video installation by the Johannesburg firm, depicts the hidden ruins of Kweneng, the precolonial capital of the Tswana people occupied from the 15th to 19th centuries.

Norman Foster Foundation and Holcim

Essential Homes Research Project, a prototype for displaced people, is a low-carbon, energy-efficient, semipermanent dwelling made of concrete sheets with a comfortable, light-filled interior.

Ireland

In Search of Hy-Brasil, curated by architects Peter Carroll, Peter Cody, Elizabeth Hatz, Mary Laheen, and Joseph Mackey, represents ecological fieldwork from the country’s remote islands, with local materials in innovative forms, like an abstraction made of sheep’s wool from Sceilg Mhichíl.

Lesley Lokko

The Ghanaian-Scottish architect, novelist, and curator of the Biennale Architettura 2023 created Loom for the entrance of the Central Pavilion. Although not a textile, the construction summarizes the whole show—themed the laboratory of the future—its dozens of crimson components alluding to the ensuing projects and the wire supports metaphorically weaving them altogether.

China

In Renewal: A Symbiotic Narrative, curated by architect Xing Ruan, 50 massive scrolls invite visitors to stroll through and contemplate cities of the future, be they modernist towers, traditional courtyards, a symbiosis of the two, or other possibilities—all with clean energy.

Rapunzel Naturkost’s HQ Design Channels its Organic Roots

A visit to Rapunzel World in Southern Germany does not involve meeting the fairytale character with the famously long hair. Rather, you’ll be touring the new visitor center at the Legau headquarters of Rapunzel Naturkost, one of Europe’s best known organic food producers. But given the 81,400-square-foot, four-level structure’s soaring sculptural form, evocative architectural details, and otherworldly aura, it could well be home to the girl with the flowing locks.

The company’s motto Wir machen Bio aus Liebe roughly translates to We make organic out of love, and the visitor center was designed to radiate some of that warmth and passion. “Our brief was to make ‘organic’ a tangible experience and to offer a deeper look into the world of Rapunzel Naturkost,” says Martin Haas, partner and cofounder, with David Cook and Stephan Zemmrich, of HaasCookZemmrich Studio2050, the firm that helmed the project. Trifurcate in plan, the facility unites three wings under a floating roof that, at one end, not only rises to a 70-foot-high peak but also plunges to the ground, creating an imposing, towerlike volume. Comprising 120,000 multihue ceramic tiles on an all-timber frame, the flowing canopy forms a dynamic, shimmering skin that envelops the building, making it a boldly imaginative presence that nevertheless integrates into the landscape through its use of wood, clay, and other natural or renewable materials.

HaasCookZemmrich Studio2050 Turns to Sustainable Design and Fairytales 

At the heart of the center is a monumental spiral staircase inspired by the long braid Rapunzel let down from her tower. A sinuous form in oak and spruce sustainably forested in Germany and Austria, the twisting stair rises from the basement through the lobby atrium up to the roof terrace where a crow’s nest atop the tower gives visitors a panoramic vista of the surrounding Allgäu countryside and the Alps beyond. Despite weighing 13 tons, the 48-foot-tall triple-spiral is self-supporting and, like the roof, appears to be floating. It’s a feat of engineering that required its own structural consultant. “Fabrication was carried out in individual segments in eight stages,” Haas explains. “The primary load-bearing element is formed by the stair stringers integrated into the balustrade, made of curved 6-inch-thick laminated-veneer lumber.” Once on-site, the segments were lifted in by crane via an opening in the roof and joined together with the help of slotted plates. Any wood waste was used to create end-grain block parquet flooring for other areas in the visitor center.

The Visitor Center Includes Abundant Amenities 

Among Rapunzel World’s amenities are an interactive exhibition area and an organic market as well as a restaurant, cooking studio, yoga room, wine bar, and coffee-roasting plant, which occupies an airy two-story glass-enclosed space in the tower wing. “It’s the only part of the building that has to be mechanically ventilated, since the heat loads exceed normal levels,” notes HaasCookZemmrich associate and project architect Sinan Tiryaki. He also admits that housing such an extraordinarily diverse range of features in a single building raised one pedestrian but particularly time-consuming hurdle: bureaucracy. “It was a major challenge to get the mix of functions—meeting place, food production, supermarket—under one roof in terms of regulations, standards, and codes.”

Biophilic Design Elements Reflect the Local Landscape

The rural location also inspired the landscape design, which includes hillocks, a flower meadow, an orchard, and a tropical greenhouse in which coffee plants grow. Playful exterior details abound, such as custom rainwater downpipes made of small copper buckets stacked up to reach the wide overhanging eaves, while picturesque dormer windows project from the roof, each an ideal perch for any Rapunzel to sit and watch the world below. Haas, too, is susceptible to the general sense of enchantment. “The most beautiful moment of surprise during construction was when the roof-truss rafters were installed,” he says. “Suddenly you could see the shape of the entire building.” Pure magic.

Inside Rapunzel Naturkost’s Headquarters 

HaasCookZemmrich Studio2050: LISA RUIU; LENA LANG; YOHHEI KAWASAKI; ARIANE PREVEDEL; KATHARINA HOPPENSTEDT; ELISABETH WIEST; XUN LI; FELIX WOLF; SABRINA CARRICO

DESIGNGRUPPE KOOP: CUSTOM GRAPHICS

RAMBOLL STUDIO DREISEITL: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

ECOPLAN INGENIEURE: STRUCTURAL ENGINEER

TRANSPLAN TECHNIK-BAUPLANUNG: MEP

MÖSLANG SITZMÖBEL; SCHREINEREI KONRAD: CUSTOM FURNITURE WORKSHOPS

GEB. FILGIS: GENERAL CONTRACTOR

SPENGLEREI LERCHENMÜLLER: CUSTOM DOWN­ PIPES (EXTERIOR)

PROBAT: ROASTING MACHINERY (COFFEE ROASTERY)

HOKON: CUSTOM STAIR (ATRIUM)

THROUGHOUT GASSER CERAMIC: ROOF TILE

GLAS TRÖSCH: GLASS

GIPP ESTRICH INDUSTRIE- & DESIGNBOEDEN: TERRAZZO FLOORING

HANS STEIDELE: RECYCLED CONCRETE

GÜTHLER GLASFASSADEN: CUSTOM FACADE

HOLZBAU ENDRES: TIMBER TRUSSES, FRAMES

HAGA: PLASTER

Sou Fujimoto Architects Draws on the Local Landscape for House of Music, Hungary

Beethoven would be pleased. The famously outdoorsy composer of the Pastoral Symphony translated nature into sound, so—were he in Budapest today, encountering the House of Music, Hungary—he would understand its translation into architecture. Just completed, the three-story, 97,000-square-foot cultural facility stands amid woodlands in the capital’s 200-hundred-year-old, 300-acre City Park. Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto has designed the building like a forest canopy, with more than 30,000 abstract metallic leaves decorating the ceiling of a shallow, organically shaped dome hovering above a 320-seat glass-enclosed concert hall, a smaller auditorium, and an open-air stage. The striking design bested 170 entries in a competition.

The roof, its underside an airy filigree of gold foliage on a black background, matches the height of the arboreal canopy of the surrounding park, establishing a continuum from real nature outside to built nature inside. “My interest in architecture is how to integrate natural things and architecture,” Fujimoto notes, “not to mix them, but to translate architecture into nature and nature into architecture.” For centuries, composers have responded to the acoustic properties of concert halls, cathedrals, and other performance spaces. Fujimoto adds nature to the equation: The architecture of music and the music of architecture triangulate off his interpretation of trees in a wood.

What makes this metaphor of built nature possible is glass, which distinguishes the House of Music from the type of building that has long hosted Beethoven symphonies. Fujimoto eliminated the opaque walls that have always introverted symphony halls, dematerializing the entire perimeter of the structure with floor-to-ceiling glazing—94 custom panels in all, some almost 39 feet tall. Flat glass provides an acoustically unfriendly surface, but Japanese firm Nagata Acoustics, veterans of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, have ensured warm, blended sound by zigzagging the panels. Performers and audiences make and hear music while seeing the enveloping park, the architecture establishing a synesthetic continuum between notes and nature.

“We were enchanted by the multitude of trees in the City Park and inspired by the space created by them,” says Fujimoto, who is best known in the West for 2013’s miragelike Serpentine pavilion in London and a 2019 apartment building in Montpellier, France, a treelike structure bristling with white, cantilevered terraces and awnings. “I envisaged the open floor plan, where boundaries between inside and outside blur, as a continuation of the park.”

Given the transparency of the ground floor, park visitors can see through the building to the other side. Even inside, they experience the effect of light filtering through a forest canopy and dappling the ground, thanks to nearly 100 apertures that puncture the roof to serve as light wells. Sound waves inspired the undulating roof, which changes in depth, though always remaining lower than the tree line.

The simplicity of a canopy floating over an open interior landscape, however, is only apparent. Comprising three levels, the structure is both an iceberg and a tree house: A permanent exhibition on the history of music, galleries for temporary shows, and a hemispherical dome for audio projections occupy the basement; the ground floor houses the performance venues; and, above the leafy ceiling, attic space in the roof accommodates a library, classrooms, archives of Hungarian pop music, and offices. An irresistible, dramatically sculpted spiral staircase connects all floors. In fine weather, performers on the open-air stage play to an audience on bleachers embedded in the adjoining landscape.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s famous glass-and-black-steel National Gallery in Berlin established the precedent for a roof hovering over a vast open space with a basement for public functions. Here Mies’s square canopy has been replaced by an organically shaped, decorated form shot through with light. The paradigm has shifted: Nature has replaced the machine, and decoration, the idea of structure. There’s a social shift, too: Transparency allows the public visual access to the inner sanctum, erasing the elitist overtones of a building intended for ticketholders only. Glass helps actualize the goal of a facility invitingly named a “house,” which is to appeal to a wide spectrum of musical tastes, from pop and folk to jazz and classical. The permanent exhibition downstairs uses interactive technology to tell the story of two millennia of European music. The program is educational and embracing rather than exclusionary, its architecture a teaching instrument. Invoking nature through design ingratiates the institution to a broad audience.

The building is the first of several planned for Liget Budapest, a controversial project by the government of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, to transform the historic park into a museum district. For all the House of Music’s formal originality, the architect and his team’s design process was conventional: They researched the site, the project’s cultural background, and the whole brief, and then sketched and chatted, eventually arriving at the key concept. “Understanding the fundamental relationship between people and people, and people and nature is the core of architecture,” Fujimoto says, concluding on a musical metaphor: “Sticking to the budget, sticking to the surroundings, reacting to the requirements—everything is harmonized.”

Benedetta Tagliabue-EMBT Designs a Contemporary Church in Northern Italy

Sinuous and sculptural, San Giacomo Apostolo Church is capped by deconstructed planes of thin copper panels. Topping the ground-up parish complex in the northern Italian city of Ferrara, the roofscape was inspired by a hot-air balloon after it falls flat to the ground. “When we were coming up with ideas, we found this image of a balloon festival in the skies of Ferrara, struck by what impressive, colorful, and light structures they were,” architect Benedetta Tagliabue recalls. “At the same time, we were looking at the beautiful city, its brick and monochromatic hues, medieval and Renaissance architecture, and thinking Why should we go back to history and mimic it? Let’s be inspired by something else.” Inspired she was. The unique roof is just one of several contemporary standouts in the decade-long project masterminded by Benedetta Tagliabue-EMBT, the Spanish studio Tagliabue cofounded with her late husband Enric Miralles and of which she is now CEO and head architect.

Commissioned in 2011 by the Conferenza Episcopale Italiana, Italy’s official assembly of bishops, San Giacomo Apostolo is part of a pilot program to erect three new Catholic parishes throughout the country where growing congregations made new facilities necessary. Composed of a 7,600-square-foot church and rectory, plus a 9,000-square-foot annex with meeting and classroom spaces, it shares a plot with the former church, now a nursery and kindergarten.

Beneath the wavy roof, a striped undulating exterior of red brick and white concrete underscores the church’s modern expression. “Using two materials was partly about not wanting to be overly assertive with one,” Tagliabue explains, “but it was about giving the building visibility, too.” The materials also contribute to the project being contextual: The brickwork, a three-point pattern in some sections, nods to the carved marble “diamond” exteriors of the 15th-century Palazzo dei Diamanti nearby.

Inside the church is equally impressive and unexpected. Light, both natural and artificial, is a defining characteristic. It pours in through a central oculus and surrounding clerestories, encouraging congregants to look ever heavenwards, and is supplemented by Tagliabue’s domelike beech pendant fixtures. Also in abundance is concrete. She and her team had wanted to build the church out of wood but couldn’t because of budget constraints. When they settled on concrete, they’d planned to treat it but realized, despite initial client opposition, that it was more beautiful in its raw form, particularly as a backdrop to site-specific artwork.

Collaborating with sculptor and painter Enzo Cucchi is one of the reasons the project endured for so long. The works of Cucchi, who’s part of the Transvanguardia, a neo-Espressionist movement, gave pause to the CEI’s more conservative members. “They were afraid of what he would do, so it got stuck for a while,” Tagliabue reports. But the artist kept his impulse for the provocative at bay, choosing instead to adorn eight walls of the church with large crosses in pietra serena, a noble gray sandstone, installed either vertically, slanted, or along a curve so that “you see the sculpture going around the edge,” Tagliabue notes. Each cross has a black ceramic base carved in bas-relief with verses from the Old and New Testaments.

Behind the altar, a dramatic monolith carved from a single block of unpolished white limestone, is another, even larger cross devised by Cucchi. Its cues come from the early Christian and medieval tradition of the crux gemmata, Latin for jeweled cross, Cucchi studding the sculpture not only with golden ceramic elements but also surrounding it with glazed ceramic “gems” in colors that represent “the stars, saints, and angels in the sky,” Tagliabue enthuses. “I love that Enzo saw that, by enhancing the walls with a simple cross, they would become something else entirely. It’s a fantastic integration between art and architecture—the art ties right into the materiality of the project.”

EMBT was keen to use timber where it could, so the firm created a vaulted ceiling of thin pine slats that encompasses a suspended metaphorical baldachin. The vault, which was fabricated on-site with intended and poetic gaps that “let something of the original structure emerge,” was about creating this “idea of being in a humble cabin that keeps the community together,” Tagliabue says. Wood, along with stripes, reappear in the furniture, for the pulpit, the chairs for the priests and acolytes, and the plinths, all made by the studio from alternating sections of mahogany and beech laminates.

One of the studio’s concerns was not having the building look too new. “It’s terrible if a church looks as if it’s just landed there,” Tagliabue states. The plan was to break some of the points on the exterior bricks so the facade looked older, but that was deemed too complicated and, Cucchi thought, “manneristic.” However, the copper roof will help provide that desired patina, morphing from orange brown to matte green over time. For a sense of gravitas inside, the team inserted found objects with previous, preferably religious, lives: a baptismal fount Tagliabue’s father sourced in an antiques shop, a Virgin Mary from a derelict church in Ferrara, an old monstrance and reliquary. In the concrete flooring, rectangular stone slabs with patterns reminiscent of old tombs have been inlaid to recall the floors of grand, centuries-old cathedrals.

Floating above the entire nave is a flat horizontal cross of fir beams salvaged from Ferrara’s town hall. Since they’re at least 500 years old and dilapidated, they couldn’t be used structurally. Instead they’re joined together on metal beams to create a crowning crucifix that doesn’t overawe or oppress, but rather imbues San Giacomo Apostolo with history and presence.

Benedetta Tagliabue-EMBT: joan callis; valentina nicol noris; nazaret busto rodríguez; julia de ory mallavia; daniel hernán garcía; camilla persi

artec3 studio: lighting consultant.

studio iorio: structural engineer

falegnameria loro: custom furniture workshop

idealwork: concrete work

concordia sas; costruzioni tiziano geom: project manager

Add tag via side panel: costruzioni tiziano geom

bover: pendant fixtures

3G Lighting: iguzzini illuminazione; stingers illuminotecnica

idealstile: paint, plasterboard

ideal work: flooring

falegnameria lucietti: windows, doors

gela: copper supplier

san marco terreal: brick supplier