Tainan Tung-Men Church

The site of the new church is surrounded by secular residential buildings. Responding to this contextual city fabric as well as the pastor’s vision, the lower floors of the church are used as socializing spaces such as coffee shop and family-friendly book store, inviting the community in and knitting the church closely with the life of the neighborhood. A white staircase, leading to the sanctuary above, transforms the spatial characteristic from the mundane to sanctified space by guiding the act of rising and turning through spilled natural light.

  The sanctuary is a raised two-story cubical volume formed by cast-in-place architectural concrete and illuminated by soft light filtered through aluminum perforated screens on the church exterior. A cantilevered wood staircase at the back of the sanctuary takes the user through the sky figuratively before connecting back into the sanctuary mezzanine. The white vertical staircase terminates at church’s top floor, which consists of three separate pray rooms.

The aluminum perforated screens on the church exterior connects this contemporary architecture to the members of the church on the emotional level. The orientation of every screen is calculated by the Fibonacci sequence and it is varied by increments of two degrees from panel to panel. Thus, the main church facade appears to be soft, transparent and flowing. Looking out from inside, the screens form a sheer fabric that presents the secular world outside in a different light.

Tainan Tung-Men Church, Tainan, Taiwan
Program: church
Architect: MAYU architects+ – Malone Chang and Yu-lin Chen
Project team: Malone Chang, Yu-lin Chen, Sheng-Yang Huang, Elisabeth Lebas, Yu-Ling Liu, Ting-Yi Lo, Miao-Ling Cheng, Yong-Sian Fang
Structural engineer: Envision Engineering Consultant
MEP & HVAC Engineer: Zhao-Rong Chen Engineers Associates
Contractor: Fugu Construction
Area: 1,240 sqm
Completion: 2015