Vol. 1 (2007): Architectures of the Sacred: Memory and Project

Shape is always, in an unbeatable way, the place for the gods’ teophany. In this regard, Schelling is right and not Hegel, according to the authorised words of Hans Urs von Balthasar in his Theological Aesthetics. Therefore, he adds, it is necessary to establish and differentiate the theological meaning of the senses and thus, he wonders «What is to see, to / hear, to taste, etc. in matters of faith?» This question faces us with one of the most interesting paths towards the perception and search for what is godly by human beings. This is the path we will walk along the seminar starting today.

Cover and index of the issue.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Let me first of all welcome you and tell you that I am proud to have you here in Ourense.
Ourense, the city called Auria by Mr. Eduardo Blanco Amor.
Every time I talk about this haunted city, I recall the famous Valle-Inclán, I don’t know why. I repeat that I don’t know why. Maybe because the genius uttered a sentence that I often quote in order to refer to my city: «Things are not the way they are, but the way we remember them». And Ourense is a city to remember.

As the coordinator of this I International Conference on Contemporary Religious Architecture «Architectures of the sacred: Memory and Project», I believe it is my turn to make a general introduction. The purpose is that all of you who are not acquainted with the subject of this conference may be able to frame properly all of the speeches to be heard during the next three days. For this reason, my paper will provide you with a general scenario. I believe that this is the easiest way to understand the topics to be discussed and to get a reasonable idea of the debates held during the next three days.

It is some kind of a phenomenon. Fewer churches are being built in the last 25 years in Germany, as well as in the whole Central Europe and a great part of Southern Europe. However, the discussion around church-building has never stopped, rather, it has thrived. This is probably due to several reasons

After the two interventions this morning, it is necessary to make some kind of reflection, and logically the words I am going to say now, in my own speech, will somehow initiate the controversy that I hope will continue later, in the round table. But it could not be less, given that some of the statements that have been made clearly clash with my conception of what sacred architecture is. That's the good thing about a congress: that all kinds of opinions are exposed and we work to reach consensus and to enrich, then, our own personal opinions.

I would like to share with you some of the proposals I have made, although none of them is exemplary. They have the advantage of their own reality: they have been built, they have been possible and many ideals and many intentions have been left behind. I will be critical of them in what belongs to me and what does not belong to me, but it may be useful for all of us to reflect a little on these new spaces.

I think it is very positive that controversial issues have been generated, questions, concerns. Of course, my intervention had no other purpose than to fully open up the range of problems that are currently being worked on, in line with the issues that have been dealt with throughout the 20th century and also based on definitions I tried to make them very precise - of what is meant by sacredness, by liturgy and by church. From there, the possibility of dialogue and discussions remains open.

I have said in my speech that both architects and current liturgists - I do not remember if I said it that way, so clear -, each one in his field is the son of a revolution, that is, of a movement that has made a request for a principle about a certain discipline and arrogates to himself the absolute truth. It is very difficult that intellectual positions like these come to be understood. That is why dialogue between modern architects and modern liturgists is so difficult.

Ten years have passed since the Italian Episcopal Conference opened the way for an important cultural operation - specifically to promote architectural quality in the field of ecclesiastical building - which, without a doubt, will have an impact on the quality of architecture in general. It has been an initiative that had no precedent in the history of the Church in Italy and which, I believe, is unparalleled in any other part of the world.

The Permanent Episcopal Council of the Italian Episcopal Conference-henceforth I will use the acronym CEI-takes, in the spring of 1997, the decision to promote three competitions each year to project as many parochial complexes, one for each geographical area -north, center and south- of the national territory. The "Progetto Pilota" contest -it was baptized the initiative- was born with the aim of stimulating - precisely, piloting - the 226 Italian dioceses to project and carry out with greater competence and care the churches and buildings destined for pastoral activity.

With this initiative, the CEI has tried to draw the attention of the dioceses to some fundamental problematic points.

The opportunity of an assignment made a few months ago by the Almeria Architects' Association in its collection of Archives of Architecture to study a work by Miguel Fisac, the parish church of Santa Ana, allowed me to carry out an in-depth investigation at the Miguel Fisac Foundation, some whose fruits I would like to share here today.

However, I must confess that for me the explanation of the work of Miguel Fisac can not be but the approach to the work of a friend, a deeply human and exemplary. When in 1997, among the numerous recognitions that marked the last years of the life of Miguel Fisac, he was awarded the Antonio Camuñas Architecture Prize, the jury in charge of granting it valued as one of the most important reasons his contributions in the field of religious architecture.

When Le Corbusier saw the land of Firminy and the problem was clearly revealed, he returned with determination to the spatial device he had developed in the church of Tremblay, 1929. All part of this concept: "turn around" a vertical prism square base and place the altar on the axis. This creates a unique atmosphere. Le Corbusier begins to investigate with the same aesthetic vision that he had been developing continuously since the thirties. But although the functional problem is present, in almost all its projects the problem of the discovery of the object is completed by means of that revolving around said object; all the elevations of the project are linked in this way, and finally we enter inside, towards the second discovery, that of the internal space.

With this communication, in whose center are two religious personalities of great prestige, I try to contribute to the maturation of the historical awareness of what has happened in the Catholic area in the first half of the 20th century, around the theme of art and architecture directly related to the liturgy, connected therefore with the broad theological, liturgical and cultural renewal that has crossed the Catholic world and that has led, between 1962 and 1965, in the Second Vatican Council. The temporal space to which I refer here includes the period between the two world wars and some event of the first decade following the second.

Also, in the brevity of the reflections that this congress allows, my contribution has been structured from the commitment, already unpostponable, to give way to the historicization of a process still too little known, that has often been recovered only in terms of militant alignment, for or against its characteristics and the contingencies of the historical moment, circumstances and options in the midst of those that have seen the light.

What I consider to be most significant in this project, as the most influential, is a debate that exists today about the space of the church. And when I say today I say after the Second Vatican Council. Because the significant questions of the liturgy that affect the space of the church are in a period of a certain instability or uncertainty. I noticed the existence of a first phase in which the predominant in most of the projects carried out is a sense of unity of the assembly with the celebrants and a good visibility: a democratic space, so to speak. And the solutions were tending towards an amphitheater. What seems to me that dominated that first phase of response to the conciliar modifications was the consideration of the church as an audience. And there, it seems to me - in short, for me to be, for my sensibility - that something was lost from the atmosphere of a church that is difficult to extinguish, because it comes from centuries of achievements. On the one hand it happens that the historical buildings, the wonderful historical buildings, are no longer useful for the post-Vatican Council II project; but from my point of view, you can not lose all that.

The chapel of the Santísimo of the Cathedral of Mallorca occupies the right lateral apse of its head. It is of Gothic design and belongs to the oldest nucleus of the cathedral factory, dating from the fourteenth century.

The reform carried out by the artist Miquel Barceló between 2001 and 2006, that is, from the approval of the project to its completion, consisted in the creation of a polychrome ceramic wall of approximately 300 m2, covering almost all the walls architectural In addition, five stained glass windows of twelve meters high with shades of grisaille, and a set of liturgical furnishings made of Binissalem stone and composed of altar, ambo, presidential chair and two banks for the choir, complete the intervention.

The result of all this creative process is a scenographic altarpiece that is configured around a ceramic triptych with three frescoes and two caves. The sea, the earth and the central humanity. The marine caves, replicators of the tubal architecture, mark the connection of the scenic circuit as a simulacrum, as a second skin.

Addressing the relationship between contemporary religious architecture and the city seems frankly necessary to better understand each of these realities, as well as their mutual interactions. I have always had the conviction that there is no architecture without urbanism, nor this one without history. And if something characterizes contemporary religious architecture is that, in fact, is built mostly for cities. Indeed, one of the main causes of the construction of new temples is the demographic growth and, therefore, the development of population centers, generally urban. But my concern about this aspect goes beyond the mere fact. That is why I want to reflect on this work about what today is a contemporary church in the city, in a new neighborhood or even in the historic city, about its relevance and about the challenges that arise.

This paper aims to establish the foundations of the particular poetic with which the architect Rodolfo García-Pablos and González-Quijano (Madrid, 1913/2001) faced the complex task of building churches for three decades.

Once admired the subtlety and strength of his proposals of the sixties, I pose the following question: what has happened to the lessons of this architect in the field of religious architecture have gone so unnoticed? The aim is to pose the difficulty of solving the problems generated by the construction of churches today, of analyzing their way of defining atmospheres and spaces, of studying their handling of materials and construction techniques -conditioned by economic availability- and analyzing the artistic integration developed in a field of simple geometries. It is about reflecting on the freedom of the architect to establish his own personal synthesis, both in the whole of his religious work and in the study of a concrete work: the parish church of the Sacred Hearts in Madrid.

The analysis that I will do of the renewal of religious architecture in Portugal during the 20th century is one of the many possible ways of dealing with this issue. I will depart from an architect, Nuno Teotonio Pereira and from three works, three churches that he designed. I think it is a possible point of view, which reflects well the intention and the strong desire to change the religious architecture that existed in Portugal, also because it was the first serious attempt that was made, say, in the field of the second modernity. The first modernity, which developed during the 1920s and 1930s, has some examples of this type in Portugal, but they are few. In a second wave, during the forties and fifties, appears Nuno Teotonio Pereira, a young architect who obtained the title in 1948 and already in 1949 projects a temple that is very significant of this willingness to change the way of projecting and building churches.

«Deus quer, or homem sonha, a obra nasce», wrote Fernando Pessoa. And -I repeat his eternal words- that's how History is made.

Woven with a thousand threads of sleep and love, I bring you today the story of a building forgotten in time, lost beyond the mountains, that fate placed in my path and that now, proudly, I push towards yours. I am talking about the small chapel of Our Lady of Fatima, built in 1958 in the parish of Picote, in Miranda do Douro (Portugal).

This is not a paradigmatic building of Portuguese religious architecture; it has not influenced generations of architects or been the subject of studies and reflections. Nor was it the result of a deep digression on the subject. It is just a small cult building lost in the confines of the rural world that history let escape in the curves of time. But it remains incomparably beautiful and true today, as it was at the time it was lifted.

The way of beauty approaches God. That is something that many have written over the centuries, and many more have experienced in their lives.

In this communication I will discuss the sanctuary of Torreciudad (Huesca, Spain), inaugurated in July 1975. The beauty of the landscape, of construction or sculpture, the cleanliness of the site and the care of the liturgy, as well as the organ music, deeply impress the visitor and the pilgrim. All this contributes to many visitors becoming pilgrims and end up having a personal experience of God.

It seems to me that the fundamental problem of church building is not so much the fulfillment of the liturgy, which must be taken for granted, but the ability to evoke the mystery: the conviction that in those particular buildings -which are why they are sacred- God dwells, physically dwells God. And that certainty must lead to work in a particularly careful way. I believe that when you receive someone in your house, and it is someone who is valued, someone important, you clean everything you can, make the arrangements that may take time without doing. I think that with that attitude of a certain humility, if you want, that also claims excellence-we saw in examples that have come out these days, even this morning, is with which to consider the future, which is the last part of the title of the round table.

I would like briefly to point out some ideas -five, in particular- about contemporary religious architecture. The few images that I have brought to support this minimal intervention are of an unbuilt architecture: the Coventry Anglican Cathedral project, of which authors Alison and Peter Smithson (1950/51) are authors. Some architects, whose work and, above all, whose thought are central to the development of architecture in the second half of the 20th century, and with whom the historiography of modern architecture, by the way, also has a debt, in addition to religious architecture. In these images of the unbuilt cathedral of Coventry are collected in a very direct and very intense - as is characteristic in the work of these two British architects - these issues that, I understand, are key in the relationship of modern and contemporary architecture with religious architecture.