Improvisational Construction Mechanisms in La Iglesia de Cristo Obrero
Team: Federico Garcia Lammers, Francesco Di Caprio (M.Arch student Graduate Design 3)
Program: Architecture
In July 2021, UNESCO added the Church of Christ the Worker (Cristo Obrero) to its list of world heritage sites. Designed and built from 1958-1960 in Atlantida, Uruguay, Cristo Obrero was the first commission to combine two of the four structural innovations in Ceramica Armada (steel-reinforced masonry) developed by the late Uruguayan engineer Eladio Dieste’s practice, Dieste y Montañez S.A. This work is part of an ongoing research project that argues that the structural ingenuity and material economy of structures like Cristo Obrero are rooted in the labor of construction workers.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, like Felix Candela, Dieste’s practice was not based on form-finding through modeling, drawing or other means of graphical analysis. Instead, the double curvature forms of the ruled surface walls and gaussian vaults of Cristo Obrero were primarily imagined and verified through precise numerical calculations. Although their undulating precision elicit a proto-digital sensibility, this line of research posits that a type of worker-led, improvisational adhocism was central to the design of encofrados (formwork/scaffolding) used to construct gaussian vaults. This project pairs the analysis of archive images with digital models to focus on the spaces between the calculable engineering of complex forms and construction mechanisms that foreground the representational characteristics of digital models.
Keywords: Construction Labor, Structural Innovations, Complex Geometries
