Urban Chapel

 

Another assignment I completed as an Architecture major at Oklahoma State University in 1980.  This is a continuation of the Chapel in a Cemetery assignment shown earlier.  Some of the parameters had changed:  we had a larger building footprint to work with and the chapel was now offset from the main path into the cemetery.

For this assignment, I set the building slightly into the ground so that four steps down were required to enter the building.  I kept the lines very simple and clean.

Both ends of the building were glass.

Setting the building into the ground kept it from dominating the landscape, keeping the focus on those who had passed as it should be.

There really isn't anything I would change in this design as it is clean, pure, and as elegant today as it was 40 years ago.

One glass end looks out over a nearby tree and beyond to the gravesites.

In the very first picture in this post, there is a large white area towards the upper left.  This is where a 3D model of the building sat when I handed in the assignment.  It obviously is now lost to the sands of time.

This view shows the change my instructor had asked me to make with the last assignment:  the pews are turned 90 degrees from where they were before.   This works because they gave us a larger footprint:  it would not have worked in the smaller footprint of the other assignment.  I can't remember whether he made the suggestion before or after this revised assignment came out.  In any case, I'm sure he knew of the coming revisions.

The one thing that confuses me about this design is that the speaker would have to stand at the end facing away from the graveyard,  likely looking at whatever urban buildings are across the street.  I can't remember why I did this, perhaps to keep those entering and exiting from walking passed the person speaking?

I'm a little more forward at my current age and probably would ask the instructor if we could re-route the sidewalk to the other end of the building so that the audience would view the cemetery when facing the person speaking.  Perhaps I did ask back then also and the answer came back "nyet".  I just don't remember.