The sacred box

FUKSAS, San Paolo parish complex in Foligno

Abstract

Making the sacred speak is always a particularly difficult task. Cathedrals, built in the stone of the centuries, sit unchanging – even when not yet finished – in the most intimate and the most exposed places in the city; they are the symbol of our culture, the sign of an objective space, perhaps one of the few which are left nowadays. Historically, the churches were the house of the faithful – when religion was a shared and share- able aspect in society – a space which is at the same time symbolic and accessible, experienced, consummated and consumed by the smoke of the candles and the passage of the feet of mankind. This attitude has not changed a great deal even when other places have joined the ranks of those which are religious, strongly evocative of the need that the public shows in relation to its minimal syntax, such as museums, stadiums, stations and airports. But there are still churches. Even in the twentieth century, when the factory represented the new cult of the city, even when Michelucci designed his masterpiece no longer in a city square but on the futurist movement of the highway, even then the sacred kept its strength, indeed perhaps it increased. The first hurdle at the conception of the sacred space truly lies in an insoluble dialectic: accommodate on one side the multitudinous voices of the faithful that will use it and transform it into an impenetrable object, able to contain silence, interior prayer. The second hurdle consists instead in the concept of limit: the edge of the space cannot be approached if not with a clear break, a sudden variation in rhythm. The sacred cannot be approached, it cannot be ignored waiting for a succession of visual events, making it somehow less all-encompassing, it can only be experienced. The third hurdle, this time inherent to our period, concerns communication: how can we make it speak in order to deliver the great privilege of silence?