Spirit Of Light

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2000 by Catherine Slessor

Through sensitive use of materials and simple spatial drama, a pavilion devoted to Christianity attempts to conjure a sense of the numinous.

The presence of the Church at a Mammon-worshipping trade fair might seem incongruous, but at Hanover the Pavilion of Christian Religions vies with an effort from the Vatican to infuse Expo's bloated commercial carcass with some vestigial sense of the numinous. Protestant and Catholic Churches have joined forces to instigate the Christian pavilion, conceived as a place for contemplation amid the sensory overload of the Expo site. Designed with great economy and subtlety by von Gerkan, Marg & Partner, the pavilion structure is based on a modular, exposed steel frame and glass sandwich panels filled with various materials -- for instance, bamboo, cork, textiles and even dried poppies. The different materials add texture and animation to the very precisely detailed steel frame. This tectonic lucidity reinforces the pavilion's simple, unassuming dignity and solemnity -- a relief from some of the more wildly scenographic offerings.

The focus of the pavilion is a square central hall surrounded by a cloister, which extends to create a small courtyard or open-air room on the south side of the hail. Enclosed by walls of very thinly cut marble sheets held in the steel frame, the hail is a tall (18m high) tranquil space washed with a soft radiance that diffuses through the delicately translucent marble walls. Simple benches of blond wood are its sole furnishings. A grid of nine slender steel columns, each cross-shaped in plan, supports the roof. Below the hail is a womb-like crypt, its organic form a conscious contrast with the ordered, orthogonal world above. Thin glass slots cut into the floor of the hall transmit light down into the crypt's shadowy, subterranean realm.

Set between the hall and surrounding cloister is a zone of exhibition space ('Rooms of Silence') where various themes relating to Christianity are explored and disseminated. A contemporary reinterpretation of a traditional form, the cloister is a luminous, humanly scaled ambulatory space that leads visitors through the pavilion. Progress around it is enlivened by the changing textures and colours of the materials in the cladding panels.

Distinguished by its sense of spare, ascetic refinement, the pavilion is a sensitively orchestrated synthesis of space, light and materials. It is also one of the structures chosen to continue life after Expo: once the commercial festivities are over, the building will be dismantled and re-erected in a slightly modified form as part of the reconstruction of a Cistercian monastery in Turingen.