New Church for Christ Church

The brief called for an extension to an existing complex of church buildings to accommodate an expanding congregation in Somerset West.
The immediate context of the site is suburban in form and programme. The approach, off of Old Stellenbosch Road, pulls one up a narrow street that is shared with a medium-sized shopping centre, its parking lot and a Tudor styled gated-estate. The incline, together with the facade of the shop, effectively diminishes the scale of the new church building, which in its cylindrical form and industrial detail, recalls the language of the concrete reservoirs that it joins on the slopes of the Helderberg.
The complex is accessed through a gently sloping ramp, screened in white breeze block, modulating light whilst softening the banality of its immediate context. One exits the ramp into a courtyard around which the new and existing structures are arranged, with the old and new church buildings aligned axially, parallel to the slope.
The new church building, a cylinder set into a cube, allows for fluctuations in capacity and programme. It succeeds in creating a space that is non-hierarchical, austere and doctrinally appropriate, whilst maintaining a sense of the sublime. Light pours in from above, through the central clerestory that crowns the drum-like structure. The cylinder is clad with carefully articulated courses of air-bricks, modulating acoustics whilst subtly animating the largely unadorned interior with a play of light and shadow.
One exits through the same door that one entered the church, to find oneself under the heavens again. Across the courtyard, one is faced with the old building newly painted in white. It is linked to the new church along the north-eastern boundary of the site by a strip of cellular spaces (accommodating kitchens, storage, creches, etc) and to the southwest by the screened brick wall enclosing the ramp. Covered walkways finished in white concrete and supported on galvanised steel posts flank the courtyard, providing shelter from the sun and rain.
This carefully deployed material language of brick, concrete and steel, unifies the disparate elements of the scheme, creating a continuity that recedes gently as it frames the world beyond; offering views of the Steenbras mountain range to south-east and glimpses of the distant peninsula, across False Bay, to the south-west.
For this juror, the courtyard; the space between old and new, inside and outside, suburb and sanctuary, is the highlight of this subtly choreographed sequence that screens-off without shutting-out, accommodates without prescribing and holds without constraining.