Church of Cristo Obrero y Nuestra Señora de Lourdes
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How it came to be
Eladio Dieste was born in Artigas in northern Uruguay in 1917 and qualified as a civil engineer in 1943. His first experiment with reinforced brick came in 1946–1947, when the Catalan architect Antoni Bonet asked him to engineer the vaults of a house at Punta Ballena. The method places steel in the joints between courses of hollow brick so the brick membrane behaves like reinforced concrete, using a cheap local material laid by ordinary masons.
Dieste designed the Church of Christ the Worker and Our Lady of Lourdes at Estación Atlántida, 45 km from Montevideo, in 1958, and it was consecrated in 1960. It is a single rectangular hall whose undulating side walls carry an equally undulating roof made of a sequence of reinforced brick Gaussian vaults.
A cylindrical openwork brick bell tower stands to the right of the facade, and an underground baptistery, lit through a central oculus, lies to the left of the forecourt. Drawing on Italian early Christian and medieval church architecture, it was inscribed in 2021 as an example of Latin American modern architecture of the later 20th century.
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