After a three-year delay, Richard Meier’s millennium parish church in an isolated Roman suburb has finally been erected

When the Vicariate of Rome commissioned the building of a new church in the mid-1990s as a symbol for the new millennium, it created a genuine buzz among the world’s top architects. Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando and Santiago Calatrava were among those invited to enter the competition, but it was Meier’s sophisticated, yet unpompous design that most inspired the jury of Italian and international church dignitaries. After a three-year delay caused by technical difficulties, Rome’s isolated eastern suburb of Tor Tre Teste finally has its new neighbourhood church. The young parish priest, Don Gianfranco Corbino, the Vicariate and the Catholic community all agree that its soaring presence was very much worth the wait.
The Chiesa di Dio Padre Misericordioso, or Jubilee Church, stands impressively in the centre of a flat, triangular site which borders a public park on one side and a car-park and several ten-storey apartment blocks on the other two. Its three striking, white shells of graduated height curve up and over the main body of the church and are seemingly filled with an easterly wind. “The light bounces off the surfaces from above, around and below and is continually changing,” says Meier. “The head is drawn always upwards to the sky to thinking about the world around us and what is more important than us”.
Meier’s passion for the project has placated any critics he may have had - particularly those who felt he was too Jewish or too big a name to design a small Catholic parish church. Aside from the omnipresence of natural light, central to his design is a structural openness that allows for a formal and wide open nave, but also the intimacy of an adjoining side chapel and confessional booths. The three free-standing arcs, symbolic of the Holy Trinity, are the pivotal feature of the edifice. The efforts that went into erecting them were “Herculean” says Meier with pride, involving the use of a huge crane created specifically to haul each 12 tonne block of pre-cast white cement to its specific location. It was a “major technical challenge,” he adds, but also a simple “act of faith and love”. The result is a building that first draws the outsider in and, once inside, envelops with its luminosity.

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Appeared in Wallpaper* in December 2003

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