International magazine of architecture and project design july\/august 2016<\/p>\n
The architecture of sacred space and the search for a needed sacredness Marco Casamonti<\/span><\/p>\n Download cover<\/a> International magazine of architecture and project design july\/august 2016 The architecture of sacred space and the search for a needed sacredness Some themes, subjects, and areas are much influenced by the era, inevitably feeling the effects of broader issues of the day. Reflecting the expectations of the social and cultural environment around them, today\u2018s architects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":65544,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[958,1798],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critical-lectures","category-editorial"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/Area-147-cover.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lab.archea.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSome themes, subjects, and areas are much influenced by the era, inevitably feeling the effects of broader issues of the day. Reflecting the expectations of the social and cultural environment around them, today\u2018s architects seem to pay minimal attention to sacred architecture, including churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, places for prayer and worship, which were historically the focus of cultural expressions.\u00a0 <\/span>However, it was not so long ago, in Italy, that much was invested in the construction of the Grand Mosque of Rome \u2013 perhaps Paolo Portoghesi\u2018s most successful and important work. There was also the era of competitions put on by CEI for building new churches and the interest paid by institutions like the Venice Biennale, which celebrated the theme with its exhibition \u201cSacred Space in Modernity,\u201c not very many years ago, though it may seem like ages.\u00a0The international architectural landscape seems to follow this same tendency. With the exception of a few sporadic examples \u2013 such as Tadao Ando\u2018s water temple and the church of the light in Japan, Rafael Moneo\u2018s cathedral in Los Angeles, and the large Padre Pio complex designed by Renzo Piano in Pietrelcina \u2013 the theme of sacred architecture has not garnered the interest of the best known and studied contemporary architects. There are many reasons for this common lack of interest, and the complexity of the question is probably beyond the scope of a magazine.\u00a0Still, we can try to identify some of the reasons, quickly summing up the main aspects of this indifference that probably has to do with the ever-more-worrisome lack of communication in today\u2018s interreligious conversation. Of course, we will try to stay in the specific area of architecture, though it is very clear that the radicalization of conflicts, wars, terrorism, extreme fundamentalism, and blind racism have done nothing to help artistic innovations that can seem out of their element in the face of the enormity of events. Though it would be completely ingenuous to attribute a demiurgic or redeeming power to architecture, at least the academic community should avoid the error of underestimating the importance of its narrative and communicative capacity, as well as its instrumental one. To draw a parallel with a pressing current issue, we could say that if the architectural discipline can do nothing in the face of recent migration of thousands of people fleeing hunger and destruction, it can do much to develop housing models designed for the emergency situation and later phases of integrating and receiving migrants, independently from the usual supply logic of the market, obviously focused on profit. This system, which ghettoizes and isolates communities \u2013 it is now obvious to everyone \u2013 radicalizes those conflicts, creating the social and cultural environment of hate and rejection that costs much more than resolving it would.\u00a0Likewise, in the area of religion, architecture as \u00a0a discipline can do nothing faced with destructive, \u00a0cathartic phenomena like \u00a0those happening now.\u00a0But it is certainly of no help to completely ignore the topic, if only from the limited angle of one\u2018s discipline, as living somewhere includes the right to worship and practice one\u2018s faith and religious customs.\u00a0The academic community\u2018s scant interest for the cultural discussion on sacred space likely has different origins and reasons in the East and West, though ending in the same results. There is no doubt that, over the centuries, and particularly in the last few decades, sacred architecture has lost the position of absolute importance that it once had in communities and societies. Cities historically revolved around the cathedral, and in many squares of Europe, government buildings and churches dominated the city landscape architecturally. Of course, the church\u2018s power over society has been much diminished, and as a result, there is less need to express its power through architecture, which has found realms for innovation and expression in civil society instead. Sacred architecture also lost its expressive power with modernity; suffice to mention the criticism of Giulio Carlo Argan leveled against the Le Corbusier\u2018s Ronchamp Chapel, accusing it of being overly mystical and monumental to the point of betraying the very tenets of the father of the \u201cmachine \u00e0 habiter,\u201c deriving from the logic of strict functionalism.\u00a0Ultimately, the line of architectural thinking that had revolved around sacred architecture for centuries has been broken and has not offered new models equally able to stir deep aesthetic responses. The lack of sacredness in contemporary sacred spaces \u2013 which some say makes the relationship to prayer more familiar and personal \u2013 has actually impoverished and saddened spaces that were once splendid and noble. In Islamic cultures, though religion is the foundation of all of society\u2018s interests, a discussion of sacred architecture has not developed, likely because of the orthodoxy and intractability of traditional models, inhibiting innovation in architecture. We could say that sacred architecture\u2018s loss of central importance in Western culture, and the extreme role of religion in Muslim communities both impede the development of design ideas for sacred architecture, making less space for an ongoing, in-depth exploration of its design.<\/span><\/p>\n
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