Award for the best monumental construction in La Paz, 1972.
The Corazón de María Parish, located on Avenida Bush No. 1873 in Miraflores, La Paz, is made up of two truncated-conical domes with a hyperbolic-cosine generatrix facing each other, over a usable area of 540 m². In 1972 it was awarded the prize for the best monumental construction by the "Amigos de la Ciudad".
The truncated-conical geometry gives the shells a double curvature at every point, which makes them resistant to local buckling.
The shells were built with the fiber-cement technique: a reinforced cement formwork onto which the reinforced concrete is poured, resulting in ribbed shells with the concrete formwork left exposed on the inside. The architectural conception, structural design and construction were carried out entirely by the Bolivian engineer Mario Galindo Rojas. The roof is completed with two small additional shells, also truncated-conical and non-ribbed.
Hidden in its geometry is the mastery of the funicular polygon and of descriptive geometry to lay out a truncated-conical cylinder with a hyperbolic-cosine generatrix, together with the solution of the partial differential equations that govern the stress-strain behavior of the shells, branches of mathematics in which engineer Mario Galindo Rojas was an expert.
The driving force behind the construction was Father Pedro Riaño, who raised the necessary funds solely from alms and donations. The parish is the result of the joint decision of Father Riaño and engineer Galindo to build, in total adversity, a work dedicated to God.
The work was left unfinished when the father was transferred to the town of Bolívar: it was to be painted immaculate white inside and out, the pews had a special design, the tower was meant to be taller and a sculpture of Jesus Christ had been designed that was never carved. Even so, the most important part was built and is a reality that will endure for many centuries.
To the master Florentino López, who led the construction workers; to the stonemason Pedro Argote, who carved all the stones of the lower wall in an unprecedented work of art; and to the Bolivian artist and architect Ricardo Pérez Alcalá, who helped with countless details and painted several pictures of the parish that we treasure. The sculpted hands that hold the tabernacle are those of doña Victoria Queralt de Galindo, the engineer's wife.
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