Redefining the sacred in the urban realm

Towards a sacramental architecture

Abstract

The effects of globalization and secularization in today's urban landscape invite the Church to make an architecture that responds to its new role as an immigrant more within the secular urban context, and finds its meaning in representing the alien and offering shelters sacramentals to a widely secularized society. Religion occupies a peripheral and not central role within the great urban context and, consequently, can be revealed through architectural materializations that aspire, not to the iconography of form, but to an iconography of relevance.
The history of the place of worship in the western city has been that of the inversion of meaning and meaning. This is directly related to the restructuring of the centers of power and the consequent reforms of the urban fabric, since they represent manifestations of the changes in the emotional places of nations and of Western cultures throughout history. While the temple occupied the center of Athens and Constantinople, in New York and Hong Kong this place is occupied by commerce. The western city has readjusted its psychic and existential center as a reinvention of the deity of the era, which allows the city to turn to the service of the current cultural god.
The Church can attest that the architectural history of the West has witnessed how civil architecture has encased itself in ecclesiastical aesthetics. The rise of modern institutions to the supposed upper echelons of cultural importance has resulted in a confusion of the sacred spaces of the Church, which become less iconographic in urban contexts, curtains of urban life, as they are no longer central nor significantly relevant. In the worst case, it is about the absorption of sacred aesthetics by the profane. What should be the architectural response to this question on the part of the Church?