Vol. 10 (2023): The client. Strategies

In 1961 Luis Cubillo de Arteaga designed, commissioned by the General Directorate of Ecclesiastical Affairs, the Seminary of Castellón, a building that became one of the landmarks of its author’s religious architecture.
In the Seminary of Castellón the importance of the client was huge. A work team was created with absolute freedom of suggestions and criticism, which Cubillo successfully incorporated into his project. There was very fluid communication between the architect and the client, through abundant correspondence and visits by Bishop Josep Pont i Gol to the Cubillo office.
The Seminary made an important typological contribution to Spanish religious architecture, both because of the novelty of the complex conception and because of the interior organization of the temple, anticipating what the Second Vatican Council was going to support a few years later.

The architectural process, from the concept to the actual building itself, is a long sequence of compromises, reconsiderations and unexpected events that require mediation strategies and the balancing of the attitudes of the architects. The relationship between the client and the designer represents a significant part of the architectural process as it has a considerable influence on the end result.
This study investigates episodes of formal negotiation between the architect Francesco Berarducci (Rome, 1924-92) and the client of the San Valentino church in the Olympic Village in Rome (promoted in 1960). It examines archival documents such as letters, sketches and drawings of the cross correspondence between Berarducci and the priest. The aim is to investigate the involvement of the religious client in the decision-making process, resulting in the final consistency of the church, and to individuate the mediation strategies at the base of the professional skill of Berarducci.

The contribution proposes a reflection on the relationship between the client, the architect and the various actors involved in the planning, design and construction of new churches, focusing on the Italian context in the last twenty years, and asking who can be considered the actual client for religious buildings. The selected time frame underlines a season characterised by different experimentation approaches for architectural competitions promoted, facilitated or supported by the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), starting from the experience of the Pilot Projects, passing through the Diocesan Paths, up to the most recent Participatory Processes, aimed at reducing the gap between Church client, user’s requests, and architectural projects. Such processes involve a large panel of actors, including the National and Diocesan bodies, local interlocutors, and the design teams, made up of various professionals. The study aims to investigate such recent procedures, to provide an analytical look at the maturing of the processes and to the identification of the collective client.

Research into the Italian Liturgical Movement emphasised the pedagogical commitment of lay associations, rather than architectural innovation they eventually promoted. The case study presented here discusses a little-known case of ambitious architectural patronage promoted in 1952-53 by the main Italian lay association: the Italian Youth of Catholic Action (Gioventù di Azione Cattolica, GiAC). The winning design by architect Enzo Magnani, the first president of the Catholic Union of Italian Artists (UCAI), was rejected directly by Pius XII, probably as an indirect consequence of the worsening of the political fracture between the GiAC and the main branches of the Azione Cattolica, oriented towards explicit support for conservative and clericalist political positions, rather than ecclesial engagment and liturgical afflatus. The archives of Azione Cattolica Italiana (preserved by ISACEM in Rome) and some private archives allow a first reconstruction of the matter, which had been completely erased from the asssociation’s official history, and probably broke any possible link between associative patronage and liturgical architecture during the decades that followed.

Gio Ponti (1891-1979) tackled the church project when he was already in the full maturity. In his book Amate l’architettura, he had formulated two fundamental ideas to understand the church of the new San Carlo Borromeo hospital in Milan (1963-66). He believed that the client-architect has been replaced by the social and more intimate architecture-function. Furthermore, for him the church project it is not a question of architecture but of religion.
The Ospedale Maggiore (OM), an institution founded in the 15th century, was Ponti’s client. Ponti was commissioned with the church project and the formal inspection of the exterior of the all hospital buildings. For the execution of the liturgical and devotional works, Ponti involved Father Costantino Ruggeri (Pavia) and the Scuola Beato Angélico (Milan). A lot of archives allow us to capture the dynamic between the architect in charge and the client.

This paper intends to enlighten the relationship between the architect and the client on the example of the construction of the church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Zagreb whose construction started in 1934 and today is almost finished. The project is a result of continuous cooperation between the architects Zorana Sokol-Gojnik and Igor Gojnik and the representative of the Franciscan Province, liturgist Ante Crncevic, who was in charge of the liturgical program, and Ivan Maletic, who was in charge of organizing the construction and financing.
In this project, every architectural gesture and every place in the space has been carefully considered in an open and confidential dialogue between the architect and the liturgical theologian, in real mutual trust, humility, and teachability. The role of the architect is that of a conductor or director who must constantly keep the entire space under control and bring the parts into harmonious relationships.

The parish of La Resurrección in Las Lomas, East of San Juan, is a foundation (1968) of the Franciscans (OFM) of the Province of Cantabria, educated in Arantzazu. The commission of the project required consensus and participatory management, along with the attention of a working-class parishioner, migrant of rural origin, economically disadvantaged, socially isolated and alienated to the urban context: impersonal, in a warm, humid and barely vegetated climate. The architectural, bioclimatic and landscape design was due to Isis A. Longo and Manolo Fernández, a Cuban couple who, like the friars, arrived in the country exiled by the Castro regime. Later, works by the Franciscans Egaña and Iriondo were integrated. The paper take as its main source the interviews conducted by the author with fray Mariano Errasti, one of the commissioning friars, in 2018. The management of the religious in the project was analyzed, identifying possible contributions for future cases.

The diocese of Vicenza, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, in close relation to social and ecclesiastical events, saw the utopia of an enlightened patronage designing together with architects two parish communities understood as a village come true. In biblical and liturgical rootedness, attentive listening and courageous response to the changes in the city, the faithful, guided by the authority of Fr Gianfranco Sacchiero at Villaggio del Sole (Vicenza) and Fr Nilo Rigotto at Villaggio Giardino (Arzignano), opened a fruitful dialogue with the Designers entrusted with the task of constructing not only a building of worship but a renewed, and in many ways unprecedented, experience of Church. The analysis of written documentary sources, architectural sources and testimonies will show the inadequacy of an authorial interpretative paradigm (awarding the merit of the architectural outcome to the architect/master alone) and the need to borrow concepts such as nascent state and charisma from the social sciences and psychology.

Sergio Méndez Arceo (1907-92), seventh bishop of the diocese of Cuernavaca, is one of the most significant figures in the history of the Mexican Church. Trained at the Gregorian University and a participant in the Second Vatican Council, he promoted an intense remodeling of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption five years after taking office. The commission fell to the architect and Benedictine Gabriel Chávez de la Mora (1929-2022), author of a highly modern liturgical reconditioning project for the early date of 1957.
By means the documentation preserved in the prelate’s personal archive, the projects and drawings of the Taller San José Artesano’s archive and the liturgical trousseau preserved in the cathedral, this paper aims to approach the figure of Méndez Arceo as commissioner, paying special attention to the relationship with the architect and his pastoral pedagogy regarding the liturgical adaptation project of the Morelos cathedral.