The district church

Or the debate on the new sacred identities in the city

Abstract

General features. The image of the parish. Bruno Zevi wrote already in the years before the Council: Is the religious building integrated organically into the urban fabric or does it reject it? The configuration of the Christian temple in what way does it reflect the reality of the urban fabric in which it arises? The question is reduced to a problem of expression towards the exterior, taking into account that the formal and volumetric variables come from liturgical and projective behaviors. That is why the theme of the adequacy of the presence of the parish in the neighborhood through the material - and of course the form - opens a new debate, which wanders between what is considered an industrial profile that is not always it pleases, the intended or concealed - accepted or rejected - monumentality of the temple, and in short, the immersion of the image of the urban church within the urban environment.
Industrial image With the development of the architectural avant-garde, the image of the temple emerges from the signs conditioned by the styles, and as a consequence, it searches for new areas of expression. Due to the universalism that is sought for modern architecture, it is considered in certain theoretical areas to annul the differentiation between religious and profane buildings.
From the neighborhood. This new church in the city needs an explicit figuration. This is because, in order for the ritual discourse to be clear, the sign must express its symbolic meaning more deeply. In short, the question of the urban image of the temple remains a living debate, dependent on the subsequent and progressive decline in the creation of parishes in the coming decades, as the ever-changing appreciation of dialectics and the discourses of architectural language.