Saint Paul Church

The architecture role in church design is very essential, it’s to design a thoughtful, impactful, and sensitive space for the user’s experience. A church should be a symbolic landmark that reflects the community’s values and traditions. Therefore, any design idea should include the church’s history as well as taking into consideration the society around it. St. Paul Latin church is a merge between the identity of the Arabic Islamic typology with the baroque/gothic architecture style. The site is in Amman/ Jordan. It’s considered highly populated with few facilities. Which makes St.Paul one of the main buildings in that area, that welcomes all the locals around it. Accordingly, the main architect had the idea for the main hall of the church to hold up to 1000 users without any internal columns nor dropped beams. The beams were made in a decorative way that would portray the vaulted ceilings in the gothic era but in a modern way that would also show our century. However, those beams are not load bearing and are suspended 60 cm below the ceiling. The ceiling was kept without plastering, where the cement was exposed and only painted charcoal to emphasize the white gypsum board dropped beams. Typically, Jordan churches have roof tiles, however, by implementing gothic architecture elements, we used basalt stone instead. Basalt is a Jordanian material, this way we kept the country’s spirit but taking the colors of the gothic style which is grey. In addition, conveying the ornaments and gargoyle elements in the baroque and gothic architecture, we used arabesque and mashrabiya ornaments in the façade framings. In gothic architecture, the rose window and stained glass meant to convey and heighten a sense of the divine pouring in from above and that was an essential element in our design. Another element in Jordan churches is the single bell tower, therefore for us to break the pattern and let the church stand out is by making an addition of a second bell tower. Lastly, Infront of the church there is two pure white marble horses, that represent the story of St. Paul. The horse represents the incident that happened when Jesus showed himself to Paul, he fell off the horse. The main hall of the church has decorative marble flooring including the alter that was made by open book technique. The journey of this church was competitive and challenging. Having the main hall without any columns nor dropped beams made the church a home for the area’s residents, it gave the design an edge and it made it special from any other church in Jordan. Therefore, we received by the end of the design process a gratification letter from the Vatican, which stated how amazed he was from the concept. He considered our firm in association with him by spreading peace with the world, by merging the Arabic Islamic typology with the European architecture ideology. In addition, stating that St. Paul Latin church is considered the finest Latin church in the middle east.