The Holy Family church by Ludovico Quaroni in Genoa

The search for identity

Abstract

The church of the Sagrada Familia, designed by Ludovico Quaroni together with Adolfo De Carlo, Andrea Mor and Angelo Sibilla in 1956, and built in 1958/59, is a paradigm of the way of conceiving the cult building by Quaroni: building at the service of the souls and the neighborhood; sacred and civil monument, not rhetorical.
Precisely the very close relationship between the building and the neighborhood, is an important factor of innovation in the sacred architecture of the moment. Through this logic of urban insertion, Quaroni succeeds in achieving a perfect identification between the building and the neighborhood, between the building and the city, in continuity with which the church is located. Identity that, in the project, is also found between the function, the form and the meaning of the building: between the contents and the continent, in all the scales.
The project, in fact, clearly demonstrates Quaroni's unitary conception of architecture and project, oriented towards the construction of a structure in which the components of the vitrubian triad were "not only included, but necessarily fused, integrated and dissolved. in the resulting architecture ", directed towards" a single representative and solid idea, that impacts, that is captivating and that is born practically -in appearance- of the internal logic and the interpretation of the place, elaborated enough to become elegant, excellent, very refined ».
Unfortunately, the building has been carried out incompletely and, as such, has not materialized the idea of ​​the project, neither in its integration in the neighborhood, nor in its relation between form, function and meaning.
By not perceiving it as a work of art, or as a sacred place, its users have modified it over the years to adapt it to the demands that had arisen, without due attention to architecture, with a progressive loss of readability. the same.
The intervention of architectural restoration and planned liturgical adaptation -projected by me- is in the process of partial realization, and has the objective of making possible (as it happened in the Quaroni project) the unity of the different components of architecture, so that this church can finally fully express itself, inside and out, as a church here and now.