Church of Cristo Obrero, Atlántida
Iglesia de Cristo Obrero y Nuestra Señora de Lourdes
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The nave is a single rectangle of about 16 by 30 metres, enclosed by brick walls 7 metres high, with no interior columns or beams at all.
- Each wavy wall is a double skin of brick with a cavity filled with mortar and thin steel wire, built up along guide lines that set the curves.
- The whole church rests on slender piles just 15 centimetres in diameter, driven about five metres into the ground.
- The openwork bell tower is a brick cylinder about 15 metres tall and roughly three metres across, its perforated walls letting the sky show through.
- Inside are a carved wooden Christ by the sculptor Eduardo Díaz Yepes and an altar made from a rough block of green granite.
- Dieste called his method cerámica armada, reinforced ceramics, by analogy with reinforced concrete, and the light structure reportedly cost about as much as a shed.
- The church was built for the year-round village of workers and farmers who served the nearby beach resort, hence its dedication to Christ the Worker.
- In 1998 a scaled replica, the Church of the Holy Family, opened in Torrejón de Ardoz near Madrid.
- In 2016 the Getty Foundation awarded 150,000 US dollars for a detailed conservation study of the building, completed the following year.
- Dieste was a civil engineer rather than an architect, and his firm went on to build more than 1.5 million square metres of brick vaults.
Why it is worth it
The church in Estación Atlántida, a small town in Uruguay's Canelones department, is the building that made the engineer Eladio Dieste famous, and one of the most original pieces of twentieth-century architecture in Latin America. Designed in 1958 and consecrated in 1960, it is built almost entirely of ordinary brick — but brick used in a way no one had tried before. Dieste reinforced it with steel and shaped it into thin, curving surfaces, so that a material usually associated with heavy, straight walls seems here to ripple like fabric.
The effect is clearest in the long side walls, which undulate in gentle waves, rising from straight lines at the ground to deep curves at the top where they meet the roof. The roof itself is a sequence of Gaussian vaults — double-curved brick shells that carry their own weight through their form, with no beams or columns inside. From outside the building is a simple rectangle; from inside it becomes a single flowing space in which the walls and ceiling seem to move together. Everywhere the brick is left exposed, and its warm colour fills the nave.
Beside the façade stands a cylindrical bell tower in open brickwork, light enough to see through, and to the left a triangular entrance with a central oculus leads down to an underground baptistery. Nothing is decorative in the usual sense: the beauty comes from the structure and from the economy with which it was achieved, using cheap local materials and craftsmen's skills. The church is a national historic monument of Uruguay, and in 2021 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the work of engineer Eladio Dieste.
Getting there
The church is in Estación Atlántida, in the department of Canelones. The nearest larger town is Pando, about 18 km away, and Montevideo's Carrasco International Airport (MVD) lies about 26 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Church of Christ the Worker and Our Lady of Lourdes, also known simply as Iglesia de Estación Atlántida, is a Roman Catholic parish church and a World Heritage Site in Estación Atlántida, Uruguay.
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