Ponta Garça, Portugal

Bernardo Rodrigues has completed a long-standing project for a funerary chapel—The Capel of Eternal Light—designed for the Município de Vila Franca do Campo on the southern island of São Miguel, Portugal most of the development of the idea came from personal experiences of grief and the death of his child early in the work.

The Chapel is an inverted pyramid that intersects directly with the rural neighborhood and cemetery across the street. 

The village council in the autonomous Azores region on the southern island of São Miguel, Portugal, wants the chapel as a ”significant urban and social gesture.”

That is, the chapel is expected to reconcile or harmonize the relationship between the cemetery complex and the village settlements nearby. 

For that, Rodrigues also shaped it in an unusual way like a flower tilted towards the sun, in order to create respect for the village and the vast ocean in front of it.

Based on a water basin linking the village to the upper part of the cemetery, the two-fold structure of concrete and metal expands to the sky and light offering the honorific use and interiority required to pay the last homage to the dear ones part of the village.

The village is composed of a long road parallel to the sea, the usual way islanders had to protect themselves from the ocean troubles, tempests, storms, and pirates, and focus on the land, cow breeding, and cereal production. 

Ponta Garça is particularly special because it’s on an upper platform much above sea level.

The cemetery is just off this main road, to the upper side where new housing is developing. 

The Chapel organizes a new neighborhood, with a new building for kindergarten and elder people on the west and a new road on the east. it links the two levels, of the cemetery and the one below, through the water basin projects itself up, as a flower tilting forward to the sun or to bow to the village, land, and ocean. 

Projecting its interior space above the light slit on the roof, honoring the use and the memory of the people of the village.

The structure is twofold, concrete and metal. Anchored in a first inverted pyramid of concrete with two slabs, the ground floor for the sacristy and the top for the chapel. 

In those four faces of concrete are anchored metal beams that comprise the support walls of the chapel on the top floor, covered and insulated panels painted silver inside, and green Guatemala marble slabs on the outside supported by the steel structure with an in-between Facar tube and clamped by the exterior with steel buttons painted copper.

Rodrigues admits that the idea of turning the chapel upside down stems from his trip to Tomba Brion in Italy. 

The family tomb complex designed by Carlo Scarpa has a bright altar due to the role of an inverted wooden pyramid. 

Seeing that, Rodrigues immediately poured the idea of a chapel in the form of a pile through the design of a concrete and steel structure while covering most of the building with green Guatemalan marble. 

To make it more lively, some elements of the chapel were left exposed, both externally and internally.

As for the interior, Rodrigues tried to design a “time apparatus” that can create a space experience as the hours and seasons pass. 

The walls surrounding the main hall near the altar are flooded with light from the six-meter-long skylight and small windows. 

Such an interior atmosphere is also combined with the wooden floors and furniture, including six chairs and stools made of Afzelia wood, which were designed by a special studio. 

As a finishing touch, Rodrigues added a pool designed to reinforce the building’s presence in the green landscape.

Project: Chapel of Eternal Light
Architects: Bernardo Rodrigues Arquitecto
Lead Architect: Bernardo Rodrigues
Project Leader: Francesco Ugolotti
Project Leader (Phase 1): James Grainger
Design Team: Pedro Mosca, Natacha Viveiros, Nuno Malheiros, Laura von Dellemann, Nuno Rodrigues-Giacoma di Viesti, and Katarzyna Malinowska
Structural Engineers: HDP Paulo Fidalgo
General Contractor: Caetano & Medeiros
Client: Município de Vila Franca do Campo
Photographers: Iwan Baan