page_title: Saint Anthony parish, Gdynia
section_title: Monastery and church: architecture
hierarchical_section_title: Saint Anthony parish, Gdynia / Monastery and church: architecture
caption_attribution_description: English: St. Anthony church Gdynia, glassworks
context_page_description: The parish of Saint Anthony of Padua in Gdynia is a Roman Catholic religious administrative unit and community, located in the Archdiocese of Gdańsk. Centered on the Conventual Franciscans' friary and church of Saint Anthony, it chiefly covers the Gdynia district of Wzgórze św. Maksymiliana. It is recognized for numerous social and religious activities ranging from ministry to culture, education and charity. The church building, towering above large part of the city, is known as one of Gdynia's landmarks. Its peculiarity was that it periodically hosted two churches one above another.
context_section_description: The monastery building was designed by a young architect Zbigniew Kupiec and his older collaborator Tadeusz Kossak, both since the early 1930s active in Gdynia; at that time Kupiec was already renown for a number of residential buildings along the main city street and prestigious villas in the plushy Kamienna Góra district; in total he designed some 40 buildings in Gdynia of the 1930s. Based on L-shaped layout, the monastery edifice consisted of two symmetrical wings of approximately 35 meters length and 15 meters width each. Built in traditional technology and almost exclusively of bricks, it housed 22 individual cells, refectory, communication and common utility spaces; the adjacent large chapel was based on a 275 square meters floor plan, its main hall 7 meters high and with separate entrances from the monastery and for the public. Deprived of architectural novelties it is usually noted as an example of functionalism.
  Original design of the church was also prepared by Kupiec and his new collaborator, Zygmunt Gawlik, in the late 1940s. Unlike the down-to-earth monastery building it envisioned a large construction, which located on the hill was intended as a major city landmark. The temple was to be based on rectangular layout some 45 meters long and 25 meters width; the plan featured a hall church with central nave braced by two lower aisles, generously lit with vertically oriented windows running through all height of the walls. The front also emphasized vertical lines, reinforced by a slender, lighthouse-like tower framed in-between the church and the monastery; a two-pitched, gable roof was envisioned. The design was from the onset challenged by the Franciscan authorities, concerned with interior features like glass walls, deemed extravagant. Even when dropped, the project was rejected by municipal authorities with no reason specified.  
  A new design, eventually followed and leading to construction of the currently standing building, was worked out hastily in 1956. The hurry resulted from political circumstances; ecclesiastical authorities feared that apparent political thaw might be short-lived and insisted Kupiec produces new plans which might get approved before the communists change their course again. The new plan partially resembled the old one, as it was based on approximately the same layout, featured the same gabled roof, proposed high side windows and emphasized verticality, but it also advanced some major alterations. Central nave with 2 aisles was replaced with a somewhat wider nave with only one, Eastern aisle. It was separated from the central space by massive piers supporting a gallery, a new feature rather unusual in modern Roman Catholic churches. A slender tower was replaced with a larger one, crowned with two high spires; it was removed from in-between the church and the monastery to the South-Eastern corner of the temple. Most importantly, a one-level construction was replaced with two halls, taking advantage of the slope gradient; the lower one, accessible only from the North, was to house educational and social activities but was eventually turned into a church, the upper one, accessible from the North and the South, was to become the main church itself. Construction material was bricks; eventually it took some 1,2m of them to complete the building. Currently the design is noted as containing some Gothic references, though principally related to modernism and simplified cubism. Hurried architectural work is blamed for some deficiencies; upper church suffered from very poor visibility from the aisle, framed by massive piers, and from the gallery. The tower proved to be inappropriate for huge bells mounted, their motion threatening the very construction.
  Interior of the upper church took form in course of decades, shaped by esthetic preferences of the friars. The ambience is hugely determined by stained glass windows; composed of square, non-figurative tiles, they are grouped according to the color key and are supposed to reflect three mysteries of faith: creation, redemption and salvation. For m
caption: stained glass
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