Emotional Architecture:
Memory of community into space.

Cluster Crafts is pleased to welcome artist and architecture writer, Ching to our Journal, highlighting a Belarusian Memorial Chapel designed by Spheron Architects; it provides an emotive space for reflection engaging an emotional look on architectural surroundings. 

The Belarusian Memorial Chapel quietly lies in Woodside Park, a sparse and leafy area of North London, and is the first wooden church built in London since the Great Fire of 1666. Commissioned in 2016 by the Belarusian families of demobilised World War II soldiers, the Holy See of Rome, the church replaces a previous makeshift chapel room, which had served the local Belarusian diaspora for over 50 years. ‘Potent with bittersweet memory and emotional charge’, comments the RIBA(Royal Institute of British Architects), which awarded the Chapel the RIBA London Regional Award 2017.

The small and modest church is shaped like a delicate and carefully crafted wooden box, rooted on the ground filled with white pebbles and surrounded by more than ten statutorily protected tall trees. The church’s traditional motifs include Baroque cupolas and vertically boarded exterior cladding and interior structures, religious icons all made of wood. Wood had long been the prevalent building material in largely forested Belarus.The textuality of material and Baroque motifs are inspired by rural Belarusian Church, deeply embedded in the Belarusian collective memory - the chapel, shielded by trees and grounded beside Marian House, a community centre of Belarusian, is a reminder of the traumatic loss of rural settlements of Belarusian which resulted from both WWII and Chernobyl.

Wood and Space
In a field trip to rural Belarus for designing the church, So studied its 16th century Baroque churches and 18th century brick Gothic churches coming face to face with Belarussians, their stories, traumatic history and current lives. Wood is a material that many native Belarusians can relate to:“Our ancestors lived in a continuous and immediate, one might say, sacred contact with wood. Infants were kept in wooden troughs; benches, utensils and looms were made of wood; and corpses were put in a wooden coffin for its last journey. ...Wooden architectural masterpieces were evident of our ancestors’ spiritual wealth and craftsmanship, which, unfortunately, are disappearing...” writes Dr Tamara, a renowned Belarusian historian, about the Belarusian culture and spirituality.

The Weight of Lightness

Tze-Wai So added contemporary detailing to the traditional forms of the church. He describes, “Undulating exterior fins form an unobtrusive yet dynamic facade. Similarly, low and high clerestory windows running around the chapel introduce natural lighting while giving the structure a sense of floating, with changing shadows throughout the day.” The whole structure is by effect “windowless” - the views from inside or from outside are blocked by obscure glass glazing, resonating the inward-looking Byzantine liturgical tradition. The church intensified the intimacy between the wood and the people.The resulting effect is part of the spirit of the building and contrast with its solid structurality, and generates a juxtaposition of contrasting emotions- introverted tranquility and at the same time emotional fluidity, which serve as an allusion for the very intense and turbulent history of Belarusia. During the WWII, in which the country lost a quarter of its population, Belarusians were gathered, detained and massacred by Nazi troops in wooden churches. Churches were then torched, a scene poignantly resonated by the new chapel shining at night from within like a beacon. 40 years after the brutal war, when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded, the Belarus villages were once again destroyed, numerous lives were again lost. Belarus suffered up to 70% of the nuclear fallout, nearly 25% of its territory and 20% of its population suffered in the aftermath of the disaster, forcing thousands to flee their homeland and resettle around the world, including the UK.

Architecture of and for Emotions

While the modern architectural design has long been prevailed by “sterile” and functional approach, and promoted a sense of physical isolation in the age of digital habits, emotional architecture suggests a more personal and intimate spatial relationship with one’s immediate surroundings. Luis Barragán and Mathias Goéritz looked for spiritually uplifting buildings,“to make works whose function is to produce emotion”. By being very attentive to and experiment boldly with material, color, light and spatial construction, and to bring warmth and reflection. Following the path of emotional architecture, the wood used in the Belarusian Memorial Chapel, its light and its interaction with the environment, generated a sensorial experience to memorise the Belerussian past engagingly, and, at the same time a cross-temporal and cross-geographical transformation and transmission of emotions.

Thank you for reading,
Ching Wong & Cluster Crafts.