Hasta La Ideas

Swedish architecture studio Elding Oscarson has created a cube-shaped church and community centre in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is clad in diagonal aluminium bars to create a moiré effect.

Frihamnskyrkan, or Freeport Church, was designed for a Pentecostal congregation called Smyrnakyrkan that launched an architectural competition with the city after outgrowing its former home.

Elding Oscarson was selected for the project ahead of studios including BIG and Kengo Kuma & Associates for its deliberately simple cubic design, which is adorned with an abstracted interpretation of Smyrnakyrkan’s logo – an awn of wheat.

“We wanted to have a powerful volume for the church, to contextually fit with the harbour area’s magnificent old industrial buildings,” founding partners Jonas Elding and Johan Oscarson told Dezeen.

“With a reduced footprint, we get a tall volume that also has the benefit of not obstructing the views on ground of the surrounding buildings,” they conintued.

“The abstract upper facade, with its diagonals, creates a moiré effect from a distance, particularly seen from the corners. It’s an abstract interpretation of the church’s biblical symbol – the wheat awn.”

Diagonal aluminium bars that screen the upper windows and are intended to evoke this symbol sit above a lower level clad in wood. The wooden cladding is punctured a small cruciform opening, which is the only indication of the building’s purpose.

The main spaces of the church sit elevated above a glazed ground floor that the studio calls the “church square”, designed to be easily accessible from all sides and containing communal areas and a cafe.

Above, the first and second floors have been given over entirely to a double-height, 1,100-seat hall, accessed via a curved staircase and anteroom that enhance its sense of openness.

“By elevating this largest programmatic element, the church hall, the ground floor can be open, free, transparent and approached from all sides,” explained Elding and Oscarson.

“The ground floor’s smaller sacred space is seamlessly connected to the exterior square; an extrovert hall apt for social purposes, from coffee to flea markets,” they added.

Facing a stage in Frihamnskyrkan’s main hall is both an open expanse of floor and fixed areas of stepped seating, defined by curved wooden dividers that mirror the curved line across the exterior facades.

Natural wood and white walls form the primary palette throughout the building, with the hall’s seating finished in earthy brown and green tones.

Across the three upper levels of Frihamnskyrkan are the educational facilities and a large multipurpose hall, all organised around a triple-height, skylit atrium featuring a spiral staircase.

A large truss structure was created in order to support these upper levels while allowing the church hall below to be completely column-free.

Elsewhere in Sweden, Elding Oscarson has extended the National Swedish Museum of Technology with a timber building that is topped by a bulging roof.

Other churches recently featured on Dezeen include a “physical and metaphorical beacon” in Merseyside by ShedKM and a sculptural concrete building in Roskilde by Rørbæk og Møller Arkitekter.

The photography is by Johan Dehlin.

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