Mexican Wedding

Something old. Every wedding has its romantic setting, from the splendour and glory of a stained-glass cathedral, to the neon love of an all-night chapel in Vegas. The scene for La Estancia Chapel is a beautiful colonial garden an hour’s drive South of Mexico City, in the historic town of Cuernavaca.

The town has long been a favourite wedding destination, attracting couples with its beautiful climate, grand gardens and proximity to the big city. Until recently, however, the town lacked a chapel of its own, and so wedding ceremonies were conducted under a light canvas canopy roof, essentially at one with nature. With so many couples choosing to take their vows in this little garden clearing, the need for a new chapel was inevitable.

Something new. Bunker Arquitectura were adamant that Cuernavaca was ready for a modern chapel, to contrast and enhance the verdant, almost pristine surrounds. Yet the owners of the garden were initially – and vehemently – opposed to such a suggestion. They wanted a traditional open chapel, in the same colonial style as its predecessor. Furthermore, they harboured grave fears that an all-glass exterior would transform their wedding chapel into an unbearably hot greenhouse. Yet these qualms were ultimately dismissed with some heavy persuasion by the architects, and the understanding that voids in the glass would act as a lattice wall, creating a cool, crossventilated sanctuary within. In truth, the new chapel is surely no more enclosed than its close-to-nature precursor.

The chapel was initially conceived as a box, then compressed to form a peaked roof. Different shapes were traced onto its lateral façades to form a prism, which was then subtracted from the main volume. The presence of the surrounding gardens permeates the glass “walls”: vertical fins of U-Glass, spaced 10cm apart. The architects describe the four façades as “covered” with glass but actually, the semitranslucent curtain, like a bride’s veil, barely separates the inner sanctum from the nature outside, in a graceful unity of interior and exterior space. Behind the altar, a cross formed by subtraction from the glass forms a window to the surrounding garden. It is the architects’ favourite element in the design: “an outside-in, an inside-out, a cross of light, a cross of nature”.

Something borrowed. While La Estancia is notable for its uniqueness, the architects also borrowed inspiration from Tadao Ando’s Chapel of Light in Japan, rendering homage to this “icon in modern religious architecture” by depicting its perfect opposite. Where Ando’s chapel centres on introspection, with its pure prismatic form and impenetrable concrete walls, La Estancia shares an intimate relationship with the surrounding environment, through the irregular shape of its barely-there glass walls, and the full penetration of natural light.

The chapel was designed and built on an extremely tight budget of US$140,000: a budget that did not accommodate ambitious dreams of oak timber benches and a “volakas” white marble floor. The floor became white concrete and the benches were abandoned altogether, the resulting effect one of simplicity and pristine beauty. It also meant that the whole design and construction process was completed in less than four months, from conception to completion.

Something blue. Cuernavaca is known as “the city of eternal Spring”, for its eternally blue skies and moderate temperature. This not only ensures perfect ‘wedding weather’ all year round, it is also an ideal climate for the jacaranda trees which surround the chapel with their famous violet-blue flowers and lush green leaves. It is a far cry from Bunker Arquitectura’s outset in 2004, when the firm’s three young principals – brothers Esteban and Sebastian Suarez, and friend Jorge Arteaga – set up office in their namesake: an actual basement bunker. It is perhaps due to these windowless beginnings that the architects persisted so adamantly with their design, and why couples now exchange their vows under the luminous glass veil of La Estancia Chapel. +

1 The original design incorporated white marble floors and oak furniture. Both were sacrificed for the sake of a limited budget (the floor is polished concrete), but the effect is humbly elegant in its simplicity. 2 Contrary to the heavy wooden crucifix of traditional churches, La Estancia’s altar cross is a void cut into the glass fins: a perfectly apt adaptation on the theme. 3 By starting with a box and ‘crushing’ it, the architects came up with this irregular prismatic form, which lightens the chapel away from a heavy box shape. 4 Though made of glass, the translucent veil walls provides the perfect amount of modesty and privacy, even at night, without making the interior feel oppressive or enclosed. 5 Made almost entirely from windows, without any real walls at all, La Estancia Chapel is a far cry from Bunker Arquitectura’s beginnings in an underground basement.

IMAGES courtesy of Megs Inniss and Sebastian Suarez