The subject
"The Form of the Absolute"
"If the relics, the miracles, the indulgences of Rome seem absurd to you, throw away this dress and leave for Paris, towards your philosophers, towards nothingness, towards despair. Our absurdity, that of the credo quia absurdum, gives us joy, faith, hope and charity.”
Roger Peyrefitte
General information
Dear students, what do you think is the highest aspiration of an architect? And what is, at the same time, the most arrogant gesture he is able to make? I do not exactly know what my fellow designers may think about the subject (maybe many of them have complex architectural projects of great urban value in mind) but in my heart there is only one, which is spatially more modest and even smaller: the home of the Absolute.
So, for the second and perhaps last time since I have been teaching (while as an architect, although unsuccessfully, I have been involved in the subject several times and in different ways) I intend to drag you into the impassable and slippery adventure of designing a place of worship.
I am talking about a place of worship, as a home of the Absolute and not as a church, because I believe that (like a convinced ecumenist as I am, and not only in terms of form) in this event it would be reductive to limit the design experience to only a Christian-Catholic building, but it is appropriate to extend the research to the spatial and volumetric expressions of other religions. Forms of worship which, like ours, are full of deep spirituality and theoretical thought. As designers, it means to us that each place of worship, whatever religion it refers to, has in itself, in various ways and with different degrees of magnificence, the entire range of compositional strategies which are the purest expression of the Sublime. In other words, we are talking about those spatial conformations belonging to the architectural categories (even if, as far as I am concerned, they all are) that by statute are not subject to burdening times and that by definition are not forced to reckon with time passing.
I well remember that last year, during the presentation of the programme on the "Room of the Soul", I often mentioned the uniqueness of the didactic experience. Assuming, therefore, that in the two-year period 2019-2021 there should have been a first phase to explore the abstract mechanisms of composing, and that only later, in the current year, the second teaching experience would have developed the more pragmatic or "scientific" aspects of making architecture.
I can't honestly say whether the chosen theme well-matches with the didactic approach set out in 2019. However, after a long and deep reflection I came to the following solution: “concrete is what is done in practice”, as Forrest Gump would say (and maybe he would). My long experience, swaying between the "positivity" of an acquired maturity and the "negativity" of an approaching dementia, tells me that concreteness does not lie so much in the nature of the subject matter of the research, but rather in its consciously becoming and methodologically progressing. And that to reach the expected goal (in our case that of keeping our feet on the ground) the right way does not always is the shortest and straight one, as well as aiming straight at the goal never gives us the certainty of happily reaching the goal.
Sometimes, and in architecture this is almost always true, the best results are obtained by blurring the aimed picture and dissolving the image. When we firstly navigate by sight and do not find the heart of the matter, this apparently incongruous and misleading method of approaching the project is actually the only one that can help us to deeply understand the meaning of the subject and to delimit its edges.
In other words, when we want to establish the compositional essence of any work of art, a painting or a fresco, it is useless to look at the work through sharp eyes, because this would distract us, rather than helping us to understand it, such as it happens to the bull in front of the muleta and the matador, in a mess of details. The best thing is to half-close the eyes so as to see what it really matters in the balance of the work: the game of the masses, the patches of dominant colours, in short, the right weight of each element of the painting. Nothing else matters. Everything else is just fog.
Besides, better than any other aesthetic and philosophical discourse, this perceptive-analytical method helps us to understand which and how many are the affinities linking the most distant forms of artistic expression, in nature, time and space. Starting from the prehistoric works of art, up to the contemporary ones (both being conceived with the same intelligence and technical ability), we however do not need to go through the chronological and stylistic cataloguing, which instead is as dear to art and architecture historians as irrelevant to us, who are called to exercise a creating activity.
Workshop Programme
The Workshop didactic programme has, as always, a preparatory function for the further project development during the second semester, from the end of February to the end of May. In this regard, we all hope that by that date the Workshop will take place as once in the laboratory and not remotely.
The activity to be carried out during the six days of the Workshop concerns, first of all, the choice of the religion to shape. This critical work must be expressed through a short descriptive report and the production of a simple functional layout. At this phase, it is also necessary to identify the country, the region and the area where the building would be erected.
The worship building must allow the presence of about 350 worshippers. To the necessary surface for the performance of religious ceremonies, must be added, then, the spaces of the accessory rooms for spiritual functions and activities. Evidently, the external spaces, very important in some religions, must be conformed and studied according to the needs of the different confessions and rituals.
The students (it is possible to work in groups but their components cannot exceed three units) must, therefore, acquire data on the ceremonial modalities and spatial dynamics of each religion. The knowledge of the mechanisms regulating the performance of religious activities is essential to correctly set out the functional layout of the place of worship. Moreover, the knowledge of the ritual dynamics of the different religions will need to go hand-in-hand with the reflection on the geopolitical implications that the different religions inevitably generate and bring with them (and as we have seen in recent years this happens for better or worse).
Programme of the Composition Course
The project, which, as we have said, will be definitely structured in the Second Semester, provides for the design of a worship building (Catholic church, Greek orthodox church, mosque, synagogue, Buddhist temple, Hindu temple, Shinto temple, etc.) located in an ideal area for the development of the architectural programme. A suited place both for space and spirituality. The need is to simply marry up the chosen religion.
In the final phase, the design drawings, drawn up by using the Revit programme starting from a shared basic layout, differ according to the characteristics of each single project. In any case, each student must write down in a Moleskine-like notebook the design reflections they have developed during the Workshop and the Second Semester.
