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CHURCH OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD - St. Boniface, Manitoba

Precious Blood Church - interior view of cupola View of nave Exterior view of cupola and stained glass window at entrance and baptismal Architectural model

Perhaps Gaboury's best-known work, the Precious Blood Church in St. Boniface which was completed in 1967, unites richly diverse influences in a striking uniformity of design. Incorporating the reforms of the newly evolved Roman Catholic liturgy introduced by the Second Vatican Council which called for the congregation to participate more actively in the liturgy, the Precious Blood Church was designed to express "the dynamic movement of the congregation around the altar while still acknowledging the symbolic and functional requirements of the sacramental spaces." From this initiative, Gaboury evolved his design towards a spiral structure, progressing from a clockwise plan which encouraged the free movement of the congregation while emphasizing the hierarchy of liturgical function. As the church was intended to house a largely Metis congregation, Gaboury, ever the regionalist, took the spatial and structural inspiration of his spiral pattern from "a non-Christian but [archetypically] Prairie idiom - the native Indian tepee." [1] The interior of the church features a nave proper of approximately eighty-eight feet in diameter, with a full width of 145 feet. Twenty-five laminated wooden beams, from seventy-two to a hundred feet long, swirl upwards to a height of eighty-five feet to support the roof which is comprised of stained cedar deck on the interior and rough cedar shakes on the exterior. The rising beams climax in the natural formation of the open skylight, an echo of the tepee's smoke-hole, which introduces light as the central focus of the structure and fuses religious, regional and architectural considerations in harmonious interrelation.

Exterior detail of cupola Exterior detail of cupola and skylight Exterior view of cupola and stained glass window at entrance and baptismal area View of entrance, stained glass window and baptismal font View of main entrance

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