Church of Santa Ana

The district of Moratalaz is located to the east of Madrid and outside the M-30, occupying an area between this road and the edge of the municipal district, as far as Coslada and Rivas. Fisac designed the church of Santa Ana in this growing neighbourhood, which is expected to develop rapidly. A good-sized plot of land, located in industrial state H, with an uneven topography and significant differences in elevation that will be used in the development of the project for the location of the different parts of the building.

The parish was to serve this industrial estate and the newly developed industrial estate X, for which the plot was centrally located between the two areas. The church stands on the highest part of the plot and is visible from the rest of the area. The parish buildings take advantage of the topography of the terrain to create differentiated accesses to the building's complex programme. Because the Moratalaz project is the project of a large parish complex arising from a new mentality in religious services that should encompass a wide range of activities that lie between the strictly religious and the social.

The Report describes the accesses to the different services: "The following is the employment with all its elements. Firstly, a large open, covered atrium, at the back of which is a sacred enclosure for the book and newspaper kiosk and some other services for the information of the faithful. From this atrium, a door leads directly into the nave of the church. Another, separate doorway links the church to the outside, but through a 'sacraments of the dead' area, consisting of the baptistery and the confessionals. The nave of the church can also be entered or exited through two more doors: one that communicates with the social area for catechesis, parish hall, bar, etc., and the other with the waiting room area, antechristy and administrative and pastoral offices. The nave of the church is made up of vertical walls of reinforced concrete and a roof of thin, hollow, prestressed prefabricated elements, a patent of the architect who designed it".

The different pastoral services are located on both sides of the church. On the access road there is a first section with a central courtyard with a parish information office, an office for Cáritas, the social welfare office and a toilet block. This body was completed with a bar, a parish hall with independent access from the outside and three classrooms for catechesis. On the right side of the church there is another group of orthogonal buildings of a more private nature: three offices, a storeroom, an administrative office, archives and toilets, and the sacristy, which was connected to the chancel of the church. A large antechristy and a waiting room for the faithful. In this area, given the unevenness of the terrain, which is almost 7 m, the priests' residence is located, with the heating installations on a lower floor. A programme in which the general parish services define an orthogonal grid that surrounds the organic plan of the church, thus forming a complex overall structure of parish services.

The project is defined in terms of structure and materials. Load-bearing walls of reinforced concrete, floor slabs of lightened reinforced concrete and the roof made of hollow pre-stressed precast elements. As stated in the project report: "These roof pieces of the different lengths required in each case, also placed in the most appropriate arrangement, constitute, together with the quality of the exposed concrete walls, the essential aesthetic characteristic of this whole complex, which is not that of a church surrounded by a few outbuildings, but a truly homogeneous complex in which the nave of the church is the most important space and therefore the most notable volume of the complex, but with absolute homogeneity with the rest of the spaces that make up the programme".

The plan of the building, as a whole, has a rectangular grid into which the organic plan of the church with its irregular shape is inserted.