Community in the parish centre

Community in the Christian sense means love and joy. Expressed in modern terms, you could perhaps also describe this community feel as “positive vibes”, which emerge when like-minded people come together. Ideally, that is precisely what happens in a church community centre. The architect, Nik Bucher, has managed to turn these positive vibes into a building – at the new “Vogelherd” church centre belonging to the Evangelical Reformed Church parish of Tablat / St. Gallen in Switzerland. His two confessions: wood and colour.

In the countryside

The colourful community centre stands on top of a striking hill overlooking Wittenbach. For that reason, the Architekturbüro Bucher Architekt BSA from St. Margrethen, opted for a light and transparent looking structure that enhances the landscape instead of interfering with it. That is why wood was the only building material option for Nik Bucher. “The local, natural material supports the key design idea of incorporation in the landscape,” he explains.
The positive, cheerful overall impression comes about from a combination of structural severity and playful colouring: the wood facade is arranged in a symmetrical grid pattern. Where no floor-to-ceiling glass windows have been used between the beams, brightly painted wood panels break up the overall image. The combination of light pastel shades looks like a small bunch of fresh wild flowers – colourfully put together, in the same way a community is also composed of the widest range of “blossoms”.
Such a high natural quality is ensured by ADLER’s ecological wood oil Lignovit Terra. The coating for indoors and outdoors is based on renewable raw materials and is healthy in the home. It penetrates the wood and thus brings its texture to the fore, whilst still offering plenty of scope for design in terms of colour. The architect’s ideas were accurately fulfilled by ADLER consultant, Urs Gremminger: “We took the colours Grün (green), Orange (orange), Blau (blue), Gelb (yellow), Rot (red) and Violett (purple) and made them lighter in each case with 15 per cent Lignovit Terra colourless in order to achieve the pastel glazed result,” he says.

Nature inside

What is attractive and harmonious viewed from outside should also keep to what it promises on the inside. In this case, to give the community feeling an appropriate space architecturally speaking. Instead of plastering the walls, the material wood and the cheerful colours were therefore also retained on the inside.
No problem with the ecological Lignovit Terra, as the wood oil is healthy in the home and ideally suited for interior spaces. And not only that: Even for the wooden windows, architect Nik Bucher already had the perfect material to hand in the form of Lignovit Terra. So, everything is in keeping in the Vogelherd community centre and everything is ideally tuned to the positive vibes that the community no doubt gives rise to here.