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Vicens + Ramos clad the Parish Church of Santa Monica entirely in weathering steel, a material more familiar from infrastructure and industrial sheds than from sacred architecture — the choice was deliberate, treating oxidation not as decay but as a slow, ongoing act of becoming. The building's form is equally unorthodox: rather than a legible nave or tower, the exterior resolves into a collision of angled volumes, each plane tilted at a different pitch, the whole composition refusing the symmetry that church architecture has relied on for centuries. Here the camera moves in close enough that the building loses its identity as a church entirely, leaving only geometry: a sharply raked wedge of darkened corten diagonal across the frame, a vertical shaft of brighter rust-orange catching full sun behind it, and two small frosted-glass apertures — one above, one to the left — that only hint at interior light. The near-horizontal surface at the bottom of the frame, pale salmon where direct sun bleaches the rust, reads almost as a floor or plinth, grounding a composition that might otherwise feel airborne. A church that looks like it was folded, not built.
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