The Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, Pampulha

Judged on plan, section and structure under purpose and site. The nave vault is necessary in the strongest sense: it is at once roof, wall and the whole of the structure, so that to remove it is to remove the church. The rear vaults follow from the same membrane, stepping the sanctuary and service rooms down into a lower, smaller order, and the brise-soleil answers the western light off the lake. The rest resists the subtractive test less well. The tower stands apart as a sculptural object whose taper is chosen rather than compelled; the canopy is a gesture of joining that could take several shapes; the rear run of arches is in part a wall made to be faced. Nothing is idle, but the necessity is that of one strong idea and its accompanying moves.

Score: 7.9 / 10

What can be stated, and holds: a Catholic church need not be a nave of piers and arches; worship can be housed in a single thin shell that is both shelter and figure, nearer a tent or a cave than a basilica. The building also discloses the condition of its making: a chapel set as one pavilion among a casino, a dance hall and a yacht club round a made lake, the sacred placed as an amenity of a planned modern suburb, and refused by its own Church for sixteen years. That conflict, between a modernising state and the institution it borrowed, is real and legible. But the disclosure is more a mood and a stance than a condition of worship that the space itself argues.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Elevation here is lyrical and light, not grand, and it comes above all from outside: the white parabolas reflected in the lake; the run of arches at the rear; the swelling curve of the nave seen from the side, rising from the ground without base or cornice. The tower, widening as it rises, gives a small lift against the low vaults. Inside, the single vault gathers toward the sanctuary, and the space is intimate rather than transporting; much of what moves visitors there is Portinari’s painting, which is not scored. The building rises often, but within a narrow register, grace and play more than awe, and it does not reach for the heights of the great sacred interiors, nor try to.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The archetypes are present but chiefly evoked. The vault is a cave or a tent of meeting, the oldest sheltering form, and the parabola, rising straight from the ground, makes roof and earth continuous. The freestanding tower, the curve and the tile recall the colonial baroque churches of Minas Gerais, a regional memory translated into concrete, and Saint Francis, poor and among creatures, is suited to a light shelter among water and gardens. But the plan does not build an archetype as load-bearing structure: there is no axis to the altar beyond the ordinary, no threshold sequence of descent or ascent, no cosmos built into the section. The myth is evoked by allusion and by the lyric of the curve.

Score: 7.4 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the Catholic church, basilican or centralised, of masonry walls, piers and roof; and the orthodox modernism Niemeyer had learned with Lúcio Costa and from Le Corbusier at the Ministry of Education in Rio, the frame, the free plan and the right angle. The building turns from both at once: the structure itself made curve, wall and roof one parabolic shell, the frame given up for the membrane, the church broken into vaults and a detached tower. The stake was real and was paid, in sixteen years without consecration. Shell vaults were not new as engineering, in hangars and in Freyssinet’s work at Orly; the swerve lies in carrying the shell into a church and into a sensuous, regional modernism.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Substitute a different form and the work loses what it knows. As a box with a frame it would be one more modern chapel; the vault makes the congregation sit inside a single continuous figure, enclosed and lifted by one gesture, the wall turning into the roof over their heads without a joint. The rear vaults make the sanctuary a lower, denser zone, so that movement toward the altar is felt as a compression. Outside, the form tells how the church is to be lived in its setting: as an object in the landscape, met across water, its back as much a front as its front. Held below the top because the liturgical plan under the new shell is conventional: the form changes how the church is seen more than how worship within it is lived.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence over promise, and the evidence is more than eighty years of return. The church has been read as the birth of Niemeyer’s free curve and of a Brazilian modernism distinct from Europe’s; as a document of Kubitschek’s politics and a rehearsal for Brasília; as a test case of the Church and modern art; and in the history of shell construction. It keeps its place in surveys and in teaching. But the building itself is small and quickly grasped, and its return comes mostly through its history and the arguments about it rather than through new depths found in the space. It yields, but it does not keep yielding as the plans and sections of the first rank do.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Field: modern architecture in Brazil and Latin America in the mid twentieth century, and modern church building. Intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of possibility: the church showed that reinforced concrete could be a sculptural, curved, regional language rather than the international grid, and that a sacred building could be a single shell. Niemeyer himself treated Pampulha as the beginning of his architecture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large within its field. Pampulha, with the church as its emblem, made Brazilian modernism a recognised school, and its line runs through Niemeyer’s own later work to Brasília and through the shell churches and curved concrete of Latin America and beyond. It did not redirect architecture as a whole; its reach is wide, but secondary to that of the masters it swerved from.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, across about 83 years. The form is whole and legible as built, vaults, tower, canopy and front in place, and it has outlived its conditions: the suburb’s casino closed within a few years, when gambling was banned in 1946, while the church is copied and answered as a model. The use began with a gap: the archdiocese would not consecrate the church until 1959, a lapse in its own purpose at the start of its life. It is now a parish church and a monument. The fabric carries the smallest charge: thin concrete and tile have needed restoration more than once, and the lake has suffered pollution. Wide presence, listing in 1947 and World Heritage in 2016, earns at most a tenth, and the early lapse and the restorations take it back.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. Cardozo and Niemeyer made the parabolic vault work as wall and roof without a frame, a thin shell standing from the ground. The proportion of the nave to the small rear vaults is well judged; the taper of the tower and the slope of the canopy are drawn with a sure hand; the brise-soleil and the white and tiled surfaces are clean. The making is load-bearing in the literal sense: the beauty is the structure. Held at 8.0 because the command, though sure, is of a small and simple programme; the joining of vault, tower and canopy is less resolved than the vaults themselves; and the interior, as space, is less commanded than the exterior.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the curved shell of the nave, born from the ground, and the tower, its straight sides tapering against gravity, joined to the church by a flat sloping canopy. The vaults obey one law, the parabola run in varied sizes; the tower, the canopy and the screened front obey another, the straight line of the Corbusian vocabulary Niemeyer was leaving. The building can be read as a dialogue between them, curve and line, mass and stalk, and the tower’s widening answers the rise of the vaults; but the dialogue is juxtaposed more than governed, and the tower does not grow from the vaults’ law. The surfaces made for tile and painting do not contradict the architecture. Coherent where the curve rules, looser where it meets the rest.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The form is small, and the score describes the form. Held: the sacred, as a parish church and a shelter for worship; the state and its modernising project, in one pavilion of a planned suburb under a mayor who would build Brasília; the natural order, in the lake, the sky and the garden the church is set to face; regional history, in the memory of the baroque of Minas and of its tile, carried largely by work not scored; and, through the refusal, the Church set against the modern. What holds the axis lowest is that these orders are present as setting and circumstance more than integrated in one structure: the chapel holds them about it rather than within it.

Score: 6.8 / 10