Igreja Suspensa
Pedro Matos Gameiro x Atelier Bugio, 2026
It was the fourth of October and too hot to keep working. I found a ledge in the shade at the side of the road and sat down. That is where I met Miriam.
I had been here for five hours whilst she has been in the service of this parish for fifty years. The building she was sitting across from was finished this year, 2026.
The architects raised the church off the ground. Atelier Bugio and Pedro Matos Gameiro and set the volume loose in the middle of the new square, between heaven and earth, is how they put it, evoking ascension, and in doing so they left a covered square underneath it, a hiding place from the sun and rain.
That morning had been the blessing of the animals - mainly dogs - for the feast of St Francis. In the heat everyone had taken refuge under the church, the barking testing the acoustics every few minutes.
A single nave of traditional proportion, but with the assembly and the presbytery strictly not separated.
No threshold between the part of the building where things are done and the part where they are watched. The altar is the centre of reference; the orientation of everything else follows from it.
The square is held by a long wall-building that advances and recesses as it goes, taking the fall of the site in stairs and ramps. That is how you get up to the church door.
Mirium likes the new building though she amusingly she quipped that she preferred it when it was on the ground floor.
“Anyone with a wheelchair or a pram can take that ramp and it brings you right to the church door.”
The Second Vatican Council spent the early sixties rearranging what the inside of a church is for. The congregation were to be participants rather than an audience.
Sixty years on, that instruction is the shape of this room, and there was a priest on the design team, Fr. João Norton, as liturgical consultant, to see that it was.
Off the main nave runs a lower, narrower one, the hierarchy between the two is deliberate, and so is the verticality of the first.
The side nave makes a more secluded space and takes the two things you do alone: the baptistery at the entrance, the confessional at the far end.
