Location_Yagoua, Cameroun
Year_2019
Client_Diocese of Yagoua
Service_Concept design

The design of the Yagoua Cathedral in the north of Cameroun is based on formal essentiality and constructive simplicity. The technical difficulties and the scarcity of resources of the African context have guided us towards a primordial architecture, made up of blocks laid one on top of the other. Earth bricks dried in furnace for the outside facade and raw earth bricks dried at the sun for the inside walls. Above a reinforced concrete frame all along the grounf floor, all the masses works only by compression, discharging the weights towards the ground.
This ancestral technique make possible the covering of the considerable structural span of the main nave. No imported technological elements is required, only bricks built with earth dug in the surrounding fields. The figure of the Trinitarian Triangle slope upwards. An archetype that also in the Catholic churches of Africa becomes stone icons with a very strong identity.

Sacred architecture, in the second half of the twentieth century, was often characterized by a strong design where form was charged with the task of being a singularity at all costs, somehow representing the difference between the houses of people and the houses of God.
The beginning of the new century, characterized by a return to essentiality, is bringing a new harmony to sacred architecture, which returns to being a simple and profound act of contemplation.