Luis Fernández-Galiano   The past was a secular century. The etymological redundancy refers not only to the decline of the sacred in the 20th century; it also underscores its exacerbated temporality. If we live in the century we know ourselves to be outside religious grounds

Juan José Lahuerta   All the photographs published in the monograph issue of Gaseta de les Arts of July 1926, dedicated to Gaudí in commemoration of his death, show us views of the architect’s workshop at the Sagrada Familia or images of the sculptural processes used by

Frank Lloyd Wright   United States   Within the interpretation of his own genius as demiurge of his time, Wright created his own formula to deal with religión, a mixture of Laotse with a philosophical and practical Protestant Christianism, an intelectual and aesthetic option rather than

Erik Gunnar Asplund   Sweden   During the long works of the cemetery, which began with the 1915 competition, Asplund had a lot of time to reevaluate the complexities of the religious commissions, where architecture acquires a special commitment. The woodland chapel would be his fi

Rudolf Schwarz   Germany   Colleague and disciple of Dominikus Bohm, RudolfSchwarz was an architect committed to Catholic liturgical renovation in the agitated cultural context of the Republic o f Weimar. His Corpus Christi church is at once canonical and modem: this large con

Dominikus Böhm   Germany   In the space of Catholic tradition, with its conventional axial configuration, ‘round’ suggested in 1920 the ecclesiastical desire to gather the faithful around the altar, to return to secular participation in the rites of transcendency, increasingly

Oscar Niemeyer   Brazil   The south american postwar has little to do with the European one. Whereas the Old World bore witness to a return to the basic and biblical religiousness – in a society shaken to its foundations and in need of a new Christian humanism after the hecat

Le Corbusier   France   At the end of the fifties, the friendship between Le Corbusier and an important Dominican whose name rhymed with his own, Father Le Couturier, earned him the commission to build two religious projects bound to become exponents of contemporary archite

Eladio Dieste   Uruguay   The church of Atlántida displays a special and rare character for the moment in which it was built: like the projects of the heroic Modern Move - ment, it is a project born from need. It is also the answer of an engineer experienced in the construc -

Alvar Aalto   Finland   Notwithstanding his Voltairean agnosticism and admiration for the anarchist Piotr Kropotkin, church design was much a part of Alvar Aalto's career since early on in his classicist phase. Dating back to this period is his elegant chapel of Muurame (19

Sigurd Lewerentz   Sweden   The long path revolving around the religious projects allows Sigurd Lewerentz to think and participate in every single part of the program. Also the prestige and respect earned by his own name as a devoted, meticulous and austere architect serves to

Giovanni Michelucci   Italy   After neorealism, the return to simplicity and organic architecture, the sixties, the decade of prosperity, brought an unusual formal freedom. Still in need of constructive legitimacy yet eager for aestheticism, the most assertive architects dared at

Aldo Rossi   Italy   If the projects for parish churches find in the community liturgy the main argument through which to develop their own sense as architecture, the projects for cemeteries look for a more complex referent: where there is a tension between the sense of

Jørn Utzon   Denmark   In 1538, after the Protestant reformation in Denmark, Bagsværd Church was demolished per order of the king to use its stones in the refurbishment of the bishop’s old palace, where Lutheran theology would be imparted. Four centuries later, in 1969, th

Tadao Ando   Japan   Ibaraki, a residential district defined by a generic suburban pattern, is located within the metropolitan area formed by the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe. The commission for the design and construction of this church for Ibaraki was determined by

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   Marco de Canaveses is a small town on a hillside with views onto a luxuriant valley and a horizon of hills and fog. The precise and white volume of the new church – built to respond to the needs of a growing population – stands out against the hill a

Allmann Sattler Wappner Architekten   Germany   In the neighborhood of Neuhausen, in Munich – where the closed blocks begin to unravel in isolated constructions – the new Church of the Sacred Heart goes up on the plot once occupied by a wooden temple that burned down in 1991, suffering the same il

Jae Cha   Underscoring the social role that the church should play, two Latin American projects set themselves apart from the most common typologies and materials in religious architecture to respond both to the demands of worship as well as other functions wh

Leslie Elkins   United States   Beyond the clichés spread by a couple of films, little is known in Europe about the Quakers, a religious group that emigrated from England to the United States halfway through the seventeenth century, and whose name comes from the contortions and qui

Jose Fernando Gonçalves   Portugal   With a typical nineteenth century scheme of squares of tombs separated by crossshaped paths, the cemetery of Oliveira do Douro is surrounded by irregular parcels upon which the houses have been raised in a discontinuous manner. Only the poplar grove

Jensen & Skodvin   Norway   On a hill crowned by large pine trees – in a district south of Oslo – a new church, following the Scandinavian tradition, avidly pursues light and proximity with nature. A plot of approximately 2.000 square meters allowed to situate the different par

Kienast Vogt   Switzerland   The cementery of Fürstenwald by no means intends to become a monument in memory of the dead, it simply wishes to be a place where human beings end their life cycle and return to nature, and where those related to the deceased may learn to come to ter

Léon Krier   United States   While in Europe the architects face the problem of the conservation of heritage, in the new American cities the challenge is to create monuments and singular buildings ex novo to accentuate their urban image. In Windsor, Florida – a city designed in

Stephan Köppel, Andreas Meck   Germany   Located on a plain to the east of Munich, the new funerary complex was to house a morgue and a new cemetery for the different faiths that coexist nowadays in the German society. With neither a consolidated city in the area (in a future the area will

Paulo Mendes da Rocha   Brazil   In the town of Campos do Jordão, the Chapel of Saint Peter sits by Boa Vista Palace, the former winter residence of the São Paulo State Government, which currently functions as a museum. Reinterpreting the adjoining position of the historic chapels,

Renzo Piano Building Workshop   Italy   The church is intended to serve the everincreasing number of pilgrims flocking to the visit the place where Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar famous for his stigmata, used to live. San Giovanni Rotondo has become one of the most important pilgrimage destin

Riepl Riepl Architekten   Austria   Within the decidedly urban context of a residential quarter of the sixties in the town of Steyr, to the southeast ofLinz, this new church devoted to St. Francis ofAssisi searchesfor the presence of nature amidst the residential blocks ofseven and eig

Heinz Tesar   Austria   On the banks of the Danube, facing the city of Vienna, Donau City is an administrative quarter of the sixties that has now become the bridgehead of the expansion of the Austrian capital toward the northwest. As a prelude to the new district – formed

Wandel Hoefer Lorch + Hirsch   Germany   Some stories are hard to be continued, and that of the Dresden synagogue is one of them. Built in 1840 by Gottfried Semper for the 5.000 members that the community once reached, it was reduced to ashes on the Night of Broken Glass and has remained th

Takashi Yamaguchi   Japan   There are very few countries where religious syncretism is so deeply rooted as it is in Japan. The practice of the original sintoism in the Japanese archipelago coexists with the Buddhism that was introduced through Korea in the year 539 a. C., and t

Atelier Zeinstra Van der Pol   Netherlands   The gradual secularization of cemeteries in western Europe, ever since they were segregated from churches and expelled to the periphery of cities for reasons of salubriousness, reaches a new stage with constructions such as that of Apeldoorn (a morgu

Carlos Jiménez   The same week in spring 1996 that Rafael Moneo received the Pritzker Prize in Los Angeles, he was also awarded by one of those coincidences of fate the commission to design that city’s cathedral. Delivering his acceptance speech at the Getty Center,

Carme Pinós, Enric Miralles   Spain   Going up the hillside one reaches the excavation which houses the cemetery. A cemetery in a pit, laid out as a quarry in the open. The wound on the ground preserves the feeling of a neglected quarry, whose slopes crumble with the passage of time unde