Trailer for a recently released (in Switzerland) documentary on the ongoing nature of the construction of the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família.
The take seems to be post-religious, humanistic, and artistic. Or at least I expect it to be because I’m a pessimist.
More information available here.
Oh, and repeat after me:
Sagrada Familia is not a cathedral.
Sagrada Familia is not a cathedral.
Sagrada Familia is not a cathedral.
But it is a minor basilica.
Exquisite rendered reconstruction of the Alvar Aalto designed church in Riola di Vergato, Italy. The video highlights the interplay of the space, light, and material by removing everything else.
Read a very nice description of the building here, or check input on the Locus Iste Building Database.
More evidence that the small chapel has more in common with liturgical vestments, furnishings, and artifacts than it does with full-scale churches. This tiny community chapel in Portugal really is a piece of furniture, and it does exemplify one of the tasks of the church building: the unification of all other physical elements required for and desired by the sacraments.
Note the many details where the system of construction breaks away to accomodate everything from a small (wooden) organ, to a stoup, to a book. I do wish the lighting were slightly more integrated with the construction.
Video with commentary (in Portugese):
There is also a time-lapse video of the construction:
A series of earthquakes in February and June 2011 left the Anglican Christchurch Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand in ruins. But a plan is now in place to open a temporary remplacement building seating 700 on the one year anniversary of the first of those earthquakes.
This impressive feat will be the result of the paper architecture of Shigeru Ban. After the 1996 Kobe earthquake, the architect responded by designing temporary shelters constructed from cardboard tubes. Since then, Shigeru Ban has spent a substantial portion of his practice designing a wide range of structures, both temporary and permanent using the paper structures. The relief structures, for which his firm provides its services pro bono, range from larger churches and community centers to smaller housing structures and shelter partitions in the case of the more recent 2001 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. They have also designed a system for airdropping a rolling machine, paper and other raw materials so that devastated remote communities can begin reconstruction immediately.
The all-white “ghost bike memorials” are a familiar sight in urban areas around the world. Simple, effective and profound.
But in Tuscon, a team of local students and an interactive display company have translated the vocabulary of these pop-up memorials into something more permanent without losing the spontaneity and sincerity of the originals.
The memorial chapel was designed by local students. Creative Machines, a fascinating Tuscon-based interactive display design and fabrication company which also produces public art installations, led the project and provided fabrication expertise.
“Gaudí was not just an architectural genius. He was a liturgical one too. … After that it looked like a normal papal Mass — only in a church of jaw-dropping beauty and brilliance, in a liturgical space that came closer to God’s own creation than anything attempted before in architecture.”
Austen Ivereigh in America Magazine
This morning Pope Benedict XVI dedicated the Expiatory Temple of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and elevated it to a minor basilica. This is the first church dedicated by Pope Benedict in what Vatican Press Office Director Fr. Federoco Lombardi described as “One of the most joyful moments in his life as Pope.” The exterior of the building, designed by Antoni Gaudí and begun in 1882, is still incomplete, but the interior is now complete enough to serve as a functioning church.
October’s Architectural Record features a new Cistercian abbey designed by Pierre Thibault and completed in 2009: Val Notre-Dame Abbey, Saint-Jean-de-Mathas, Quebec. Here is yet one more example that the Cistercians have always been and continue to be the finest architectural patrons in Christendom. The continuity of their recent buildings are perhaps the best illustration of what a “living tradition” might look like in built form.
Well now, the Congregation for Divine Worship does in fact say that for vestements and colors “preference should be given to materials, forms and colors which are in use in the country.”
Here is an introduction to another theme of liturgical architecture: the personal chapel, home shrine or ofrenda. Decidedly vernacular, adaptive (redemptive?) reuse, these small spaces provide insight into the organic development of devotional practice and therefore have some bearing on the development of communal architecture as well. Though most can certainly be written off as kitsch from the top-down high-culture standpoint, to do so is to amputate a living member.
To paraphrase Dom Hans van der Laan, individual devotion based on the communal liturgy must be seen as a derivation. So too, the personal chapel is a derivation of the communal liturgical space. But as devotion has a way of organically integrating into tradition, practice and even doctrine, these small spaces of personal preference may inform our communal building practices. This is especially important since liturgical building and expression require far more guidance from below than does liturgical practice itself.
And so I am pleased to find this high quality video introduction to the personal chapel in the preserved chambers of Venerable (soon-to-be Blessed) John Henry Cardinal Newman.
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