Hebe Gianotti
That the modern churches are bad is not a common place whatsoever. The assessment combines simple faithful for once, art critics, secular intellectuals until you get to Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, in practice the minister of culture and heritage of the Vatican, which wanted to mention about this topic Turoldo father, "today the churches are like a garage where God is parked and the faithful are all lined up in front of him. "
Yet several of the churches new contemporary architects are delegated to the most popular, and the problem can not even lie in religious belief or not the designers of the past if a negative example is the church of S. Paul in Foligno, Massimiliano Fuksas by a new convert to the merits of Pope Benedict XVI as he said in an interview. In this particular case, we are faced with an object that in no way shows some kinship with the long tradition of Christian churches. A huge monolith of concrete, consisting of two boxes inserted into one another and connected by elements in the shape of a truncated pyramid, silent, unlike the real architecture that sing, as he said Enzo Paci.
It is these elements - the type of abstract composition, the result of simple transposition of schematic and non geometric forms of the difficult process that, in the apparent simplicity formal condensation complexity and articulation - reveal their lineage from unsorted temples of metaphysics as it was designed by architects revolutionary Enlightenment in France in 1700.
It begins with Blondel and the facade of the monastery church like a tomb, where an obelisk to support the cross, continues with his most famous pupil, whose Boullee cenotaphs are the obligatory reference for any architect who is preparing to build new churches and underground churches which designs (no dedication to the saints, the Virgin Mary, to Christ, all are gone) seem the model of the Capitol in Washington or Paris Opera. Then we arrive at Lequeu concludes that the parable, after Silence of the temples and shrines of Isis or Persians, with the Temple to the Unknown God.
And to an unknown god seem in fact belong to the modern churches. Buildings in icy, cold and bare those proposed by French architects, as well as contemporary, created from the gesture of the designer, then strongly quasi-divine and a little 'more glamorous today, which interrupts the historical link with the people behind the construction of each church .
environments naked , the lack of variety of materials, the minimum of interference and iconography, as a consequence, the almost total absence of skilled artists and craftsmen, we recall how, on the contrary, the relationship of the people building the house of God was manifested for centuries in a very concrete way. In the work of artisans, carpenters, masons, decorators, plasterers who took turns in generation after generation of those sites that were endless and the cathedrals in which encompassed the best of the ability "to do" typical man.
That particular mode that Pavel A. Florenskij defined with these words: a very special spirit of the constitution: experience and habits inherited and formed over the centuries ... probably the healthiest type of creative process, which flows within well-defined banks, without suffering, no worries, no romance, no tears and without ecstasy, with a quiet confidence in his own hand, saying that he already knows what to do ... this skill is very far from the spirit of our times, where everything is based on sincerity and piercing on the lapse, or the desire to produce something other than what has already been done by others, to see, to amaze, hitting, and terror can end up accidentally on a road already traveled somewhere else.
Today, no one enters in a modern church to admire a fresco, an altar, a bas-relief, to experience the beauty of the interior space and light that filters through the windows, yet the experience of beauty is one that more forcefully brings man closer to God, the Church has always known.
But page through the catalog of the international exhibition of architecture to the sacred space, held in Bologna in 1996 under the patronage of the CEI, wonder if perhaps he knows more and that the faults are not to be charged only to the architects for their projects, but also to religious commissions that approve them.
from plants is difficult to understand that these buildings for worship, Forget aisles, transepts and apses, chapels, crypts, overrides the central plan , changed and distorted in every possible way: ellipses, wedges, triangles, circles, squares.
And when the model is rectangular, not rank to nothing more than a classroom (of court, canteen, conference for theater?). Almost no bell, verticality is little or nothing and if you want the stress often is no other solution than the form of a stylized Christmas tree, with sloped down to the ground, in the manner of a hypothetical hut that does not even exist in the mountains.
The recent publications the results of competitions sponsored by the CEI for the new Italian churches, I speak of 2010, does not offer encouraging examples.
Yet each designer was supported by a priest, liturgist, precisely to avoid subjective ridiculous inventions by the architect. And to read the reports of the winning submission, or at least the second and third place, even before examining boards and renderings, often one can not but agree with the intentions. But then it is as if the words do not match the action and produced a disconnect exists between the two terms.
So here we are again with churches that seem to crematoria (St. George the Martyr, Dresden), churches aphasia, where the display of the crucifix is \u200b\u200bthe only concession to Christian iconography. Disappearing traces of the biblical narrative, pictorial want, want sculptural, minimalist spaces and remain deadly, forms or "organic", that since we are close to the sea (St. John the Baptist, Porto Recanati) are inspired by the waves, or even asked to alert to minimize energy requirements in order to classify the building Energy Class A (!).
Or projects churches "crumpled" (Our Lady of Mount Caramel, Racalmuto), inspired by the work of Frank Gehry, if they get an earthquake to destroy no one notices.
short, even with the liturgist that breathing down your neck, it seems that you do not know where to turn.
(from Renaissance sacred)
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