White Rotunda

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-09 00:52

The Catholic community of the Moravian village of Sazovice, located less than ten kilometers from Zlín, first thought about building their own church between the two World Wars. The believers returned to this idea only in 2011: for this purpose, they organized a building cooperative and entrusted the design to Marek Jan Stepan and his bureau Atelier Štěpán.

The architect, without abandoning the modern architectural language, turned to the thousand-year tradition of Czech temple building. The shape of the rotunda chosen by him - on the one hand, not the most common, on the other - extremely important for Christian religious architecture since its inception - became for Stepan primarily a reflection of the ideality of God through the shape of a circle, as well as a reference to the history of St. Wenceslas. This prince-martyr in the 10th century built a rotundal chapel in Prague, the dimensions of which were repeated in the project of the church in Sazovice. This chapel was later rebuilt in the Gothic era: it is part of St. Vitus Cathedral, and it is there that the relics of St. Wenceslas. A piece of this relic is now placed in the altar of the church in Sazovice.

Four options were considered as a site for the new construction, in the end, a site was chosen in the very center of the village, at the intersection of the main streets. During the construction, it turned out that if you stand in front of the altar and look out the main window, then it faces the chapel of St. Wenceslas in the Prague cathedral.

For Štepan, it was important to dematerialize the building: openings in concrete walls, reminiscent of cuts in a paper cylinder, serve this purpose. The architect explains the minimalism of the interior, which is generally characteristic of modern cult architecture, as follows: in the Gothic and Baroque eras, magnificent decor, paintings and sculptures served, among other things, as a “Bible for the illiterate”, as a source of information. Modern man, on the other hand, is overloaded with information, and the church serves him as a quiet space for reflection and self-reflection.

In the interior, attention is immediately drawn to the streamlined bronze volume of the altar, also designed by Stepan. The images on the walls were created by artist Vladimir Kokolei.