St. Pius Chapel and Prayer Garden

From the May 2019 Issue of ARCHITECT:

A small adoration chapel and garden rendered in simple materials allow for quiet contemplation.

New Orleans–based Eskew+Dumez+Ripple (EDR) has added a new dimension to modern ecclesiastical architecture with its St. Pius Chapel and Prayer Garden, an intimate space for worship and contemplation in New Orleans’ Lakeshore/Lake Vista neighborhood. Mere steps (as the area’s name suggests) from Lake Pontchartrain, the existing church was designed by local architect James Lamantia in 1966, and is a reserved but accomplished modernist affair of sloping angular roofs. Adapting this midcentury idiom to a more modest scale, EDR’s building is a small volume at only 571 square feet, and is situated directly beside the main structure, its jagged silhouette making it appear like a small shard chipped from its larger neighbor.

Its greatest appeal becomes evident within: At less than 600 square feet, the space is as intimate as any apsidal chapel in an old European cathedral, but its layered materiality of wood fixtures, white walls, and stone floors gives it a crisp contemporaneity. Entirely free of ornament, the design nonetheless hews to customary Christian symbology with a cross-shaped window inscribed in the southeast-facing wall. That aperture is complemented by another thin, floor-to-ceiling window and an additional glazed clerestory, allowing sunshine to creep in from odd angles and pervade the space with a numinous glow.

The deft handling of light is further accentuated by a processional order that has visitors enter by way of a low, 8-foot-tall foyer, which is wedged narrowly alongside a bathroom and service closet, before proceeding into the square-planned, 18-foot-tall main chapel—a shift from the dark and confined into the lofty and radiant, intimating the transition from the secular to the sacred realm. Rich in metaphor, deferential in context, EDR’s chapel is also a shared space for a community very much in need of one, making the case for a religious architecture that reclaims the word “religion” in its original sense, meaning “to bind together.”

This project won a 2016 AIA Small Projects Award. It originally appeared in the December 2015 issue of ARCHITECT.

When the archdiocese of New Orleans decided to build a new chapel at St. Pius X parish, in the city’s Lake Vista subdivision, they weren’t looking to expand the 1963 church building, but rather to create a separate—and much smaller—space for quiet contemplation. So the team at local firm Eskew+Dumez+Ripple (EDR) set about designing a grace note: a 571-square-foot freestanding chapel and attached prayer garden that sit in the shadow of, but are not dwarfed by, the existing 13,850-square-foot church. In fact, the distinctive faceted geometry of the copper-roofed church influenced the new chapel’s sculpted form.

The overall palette of materials is equally simple, to balance the sense of the sacred with a tight budget. The exterior is predominantly cement plaster with copper details—the inverse of the main church’s exterior. Inside, the floor is an engineered stone, and gypsum board is used for the walls and ceilings. Walnut veneer is deployed in a screen between the entry and sanctuary, as a counter for reading materials, and to frame the tabernacle. What wasn’t part of the initial program is the prayer garden to the north of the chapel, which was added so that its absorbent planting beds could help with flood control—an important consideration in Lake Vista, which is built on land reclaimed from nearby Lake Ponchartrain.

“Good church architecture encourages you to put the secular behind,” Ripple says. EDR’s chapel manages to achieve this goal by deftly creating a small structure that evokes the eternal through a compelling interplay of form and light, focusing the attention of the parish community upon the ineffable.