viralbandit
After a series of religious commissions, Mexico City-based Bunker Arquitectura constructed a chapel on top of an Acapulco hill. Completed in 2011, ‘Sunset Chapel’ looks out onto the bay and stands in harmony with the natural environment.
The striking design is born from the architects awareness that the building represents hope and love, but also moments of sadness such as mourning the passing of loved ones. To visually symbolise this, Bunker Arquitectura constructed the chapel to embody a series of tensions: glass and concrete, the ethereal and heavy, classical proportions and apparent chaos, the ephemeral and lasting. ‘Sunset Chapel’ was designed to aesthetically mimic the presence of large granite rocks that are piled up on the hill–the architects explain, “we worked hard to make the chapel look like just another colossal boulder atop the mountain.” Bunker Arquitectura abandoned the employment of a signature style in exchange for a construction that formed a more conceptual dialogue with its location and purpose. By offering a middle ground between site-specific harmony and other-worldly, geometric form, ‘Sunset Chapel’ presents an innovative contemporary place of worship.
