The Cavedone district church, Bologna

Abstract

The project for the church and the parish complex of the Cavedone district, in Bologna, is included in a debate that has animated the Italian architectural world in the so-called period of reconstruction, from the postwar period to the mid-sixties, approximately . This debate was interested in the project of buildings for public and popular construction, that responded completely to the social purpose to which they were called.
To develop the project of this church, along with that of the whole neighborhood, came the engineer-architect Federico Gorio, an important figure of the national panorama of that period for the contribution made precisely to the search for a new identity of Italian architecture.
The first project developed for the church clearly shows the willingness to respond in a twofold way: the lay need, typical of a State in the renovation phase, to give architecture a new purpose that is expressed above all through the revaluation of its social function, and the religious need to restore to the church its original vocation of identification with the community, with the assembly (the ecclesia).
The vision of community spaces as instruments of social cohesion represents the value shared by two personalities: the architect Federico Gorio and Cardinal Lercaro, who are at the beginning of the church project and the attached structure of Cavedone street.
The analysis of the project in question, often reconsidered and never carried out, offers at the same time the possibility of reinterpreting - also living the practical difficulty of realization and communication - the elements of a historically central debate for the Italian and European sacred architecture of that period , and the possibility of valuing the elements of modernity and actuality that this project presents, in light of the most recent evolution of religious and secular thought in this regard.