Boris Stoyanov
Saint Mary of the Assumption
Columbia GSAPP
Spring 2025
Building Documentation
Professor Marc Tsurumaki
Pier Luigi Nervi + Pietro Belluschi
San Francisco, California
1971
Four thin-shell hyperbolic paraboloid panels rise from concrete piers at each corner of a square base, curving inward to meet at a central cross-shaped oculus. The form is at once structural and spatial: Nervi’s shell geometry spans vast distances with minimal material, creating a continuous interior volume uninterrupted by columns. The concrete is both structure and surface—left exposed, it reads as weight and enclosure.
But it’s the scale that overwhelms. The interior space, nearly 200 feet tall, cannot be understood through conventional drawings or photographs. It is immersive, spatially disorienting, and vertically charged. This drawing attempts to capture that: the gravitational pull upward, the compression at the base, and the expansion toward the light.
Light enters through four vertical bands of stained glass set into the folds of the shell. These narrow slits inject color into the otherwise austere interior, casting rainbow gradients that migrate with the sun. The concrete catches this color like a canvas—absorbing it, bending it, refracting it across curving surfaces.
At the center, directly beneath the oculus, hangs the chandelier—not a source of light, but a receiver of it. Composed of thousands of suspended metal tubes, it reflects and refracts daylight from above. It hovers mid-air, untethered yet geometrically precise, catching the color and diffusing it in all directions. It is not an ornament but an instrument of perception: an optical event that anchors the scale of the space and frames the sky above. A stairway to heaven—not to ascend, but to see.