Architecture | Cristo Obrero Church by Eladio Dieste

Eladio Dieste was an engineer and architect from Uruguay who worked on everything from grain silos to churches during his career.

One of those churches, Church of Christ Obrero, is located near one of Uruguay’s seaside resorts, Atlanta. Dieste took on the project in 1952. The building, which was Dieste’s first architectural project, was made to stabilize the local economy as a tourism attraction. It served as an experiment for the architect’s interest in brick and laminate building materials. It’s known for its sinusoidal wave forms, suggesting — to us at least— that God can be found in mathematics.

Open Buildings states of the structure:

“Dieste built an extraordinarily complex object of architecture and formal technology, setting up a deep cross from the programmatic aspects of the church and the expressive possibilities of its research. Designed as a rectangular nave thirty feet long by sixteen feet wide, covering nineteen meters in height at its widest points. The wavy line of the floor is repeated and magnified in the surprising side walls, built as a succession of half-cylinders of seven meters high, straight at the base and wavy on top, with irregular holes closed with colored glass. The union between the rolling surfaces of the floor and walls introduces a particular instability that causes strange effects of the layers of brick in sight.”

More photographs of Dieste’s religious expression follow.

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