Church of Beatified Restituta in Brno-Sever, Czech Republic by Atelier Štěpán.

Atelier Štěpán has distilled the colours of a kaleidoscope into their scheme for the Church of Beatified Restituta in Brno-Sever, Czech Republic. The building was designed to act as a quiet place of contemplation, Atelier Štěpán co-founder Marek Štěpán stating – “I wanted to make a church for the people of today. The question of the perception of a church is a question of the contemporary perception of the world,” he says.

A rainbow-coloured stained-glass window wraps around the base of the concrete dome, causing a myriad of different coloured lights to dance across the bare concrete surfaces. This clever architectural gesture forms the main decorative feature in the highly restrained scheme. The patterns created by the colours shift throughout the day as the sun moves across the sky.

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“In the baroque period, the church interior was completely covered with religious depictions,” says Štěpán. “It served as a kind of comic book because the visitors were not able to read, so the life of Jesus and the saints and the stories of the Old Testament were depicted in the church in various forms. Today, the situation is reversed,” he continues. “We live in the world full of easily accessible information, of visual and other sensations attacking us on every front, so the church should serve as a space for contemplation – a space stripped of superfluous visual, and other, sensations.“

Besides the small stage leading into the sacristy, the main auditorium is only broken up by the entrance and accompanying staircase that provides access to two curved concrete balconies. The subsequent emptiness serves to emphasise the scale of the space and draw visitors’ eyes upward.

The architect explains he chose a circular form as the shape representing heaven and eternity – the concrete dome above the ring of windows suggests heaven above the city. Štěpán has purposefully designed the auditorium to ensure the windows are not visible to those inside, creating a sense of the unknown within the building.

“There surely are matters that transcend us and that are veiled because they lie on or beyond the very limits of our human perception,” says Štěpán. “If there is any way to interpret them architectonically, I attempted that in the form of the Lesná church dome,” he continues.

“The light falls inside the church but the source cannot be seen. The windows are hidden behind a wide ledge. The source of the light is veiled. On both conscious and unconscious levels, the light in the church represents the existence of the world beyond our physical experience and the existence of God.”

[Images courtesy of Atelier Štěpán. Photography by BoysPlayNice.]