Architect-Designed Chapels Create Modern-Day Places of Worship

Via Inhabitat, the architects explained the reasoning behind the wooden skin, saying that, “the outer shell serves as a filter of the view outside, implying the start of a religious spatial experience.” Inside, a bright white octangonal floor plan is illuminated by reflected natural light.

The Chapel of St. Lawrence by Avanto Architects, which opened in 2010, is set in a historic site in Vantaa, Finland. The new building links the town's old medieval stone church and bellcote to a new, modern volume.

The massing and materials are in response to existing surroundings, with use of rendered brickwork, natural stone, mesh, and patinated copper sheet, as seen applied to the walls and ceiling of the chapel's sanctuary. [via Architizer]

Tria Studio designed a farewell chapel on the grounds of a cemetery in Slovenia's Tuhinj Valley. [via Dezeen]

Cross laminated timber is used for the interior because of the area's rich woodworking tradition, a conscious material choice by the architects to warm up what could easily be a cold type of building.

Clerestory windows, set into the brick facade with fins, rings the top of Níall McLaughlin Architects's chapel at Ripon Theological College in Oxford.

A timber glulam structure forms trusswork beneath a lime plaster ceiling in the main nave of McLaughlin's chapel. [via Niall McLaughlin Architects]

The circa-2011 Bøler church in Oslo, Norway, was designed by Hansen-Bjørndal Arkitekter AS with three main volumes: a church hall on a plateau, a ground-floor congregational hall, and a chapel carved out of the earth. [via Arch Daily]

Bøler Church's serene chapel, carved into the side of a hill, is lined in brick and accented with wood and glass.

Hiroshi Nakamura's Ribbon Chapel in Hiroshima orients two asymmetrical winding pathways that connect at a rooftop apex.

The curling "ribbons," intersected by glass cathedral walls, rise to a central oculus for a sublime effect.