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Vicens + Ramos clad the Parish Church of Santa Monica entirely in weathering steel — a material more commonly found on industrial infrastructure than sacred architecture — trusting that its slow oxidation into deep amber and rust would give the building the kind of patina that older Madrid churches earned over centuries of soot and time. The formal language is equally unorthodox: the massing breaks into sharp, angled volumes that lean and cut against one another, rejecting the symmetry and axiality that Christian church-building has observed since the Romanesque. Here the photograph closes in on one of those collisions — a faceted diagonal plane of streaked corten panels thrusting upward and to the right, its edge meeting a narrow gap of blazing white light from a clerestory opening above, while deep shadow pools in the receding void at lower left. The tiled steel surface catches the Madrid sun unevenly across its face, each panel registering a slightly different depth of rust, the vertical streaking left by years of rain running down a material that is, by design, always in the process of becoming.
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