Building the Religious Space

A Teaching Experience at the Madrid School of Architecture

Abstract

I'm going to basically explain a teaching experience; a subject that I have been teaching for four years at the School of Architecture of Madrid, which started with a small initiative - a research seminar on architecture and liturgy - by the then chaplain of the school. And at a certain moment, we saw the possibility of transforming that seminar into a subject of free configuration. In such a way that I made the procedures, I designed a program, and the subject has been introduced in the curriculum. I think we are the first architecture school in Spain that has a subject of this nature. As you will understand, it is a signature that has only been developing for four years and for which I had to start practically from scratch; not because there was no bibliography, but because the special point of view I wanted to transmit to my students required it.

Having said that, I want to present what basically constitutes my main objective: how to develop in students what I call «symbolic thinking capacity». In my opinion, this ability is at the base of the understanding of the ideas that underlie a sacred building, and constitutes a field of research so wide -and in a sense so foreign to our contemporary culture- that my subject intends to investigate how to build that bridge. Therefore, we still do not have concrete proposals, we have not built a church, we have not yet done any experimental workshops. We are opening a line of research, but we think we are on the right track. And I see this in the enthusiasm and response of my students, most of whom are not believers, some of them are not even baptized or have simply never heard of liturgy or theology. Then, you will understand that trying to transmit, that trying to introduce into your heart and in your head the vibration necessary to arouse artistic creation is an exciting challenge - or that I have assumed as exciting - and in which possibly the person who learns the most is me same