BDR Architekci   Poland   The municipal cemetery of Radom dates back to 1957 and is currently among Poland's largest. It was to curb this necropolis's rapid expansion into surrounding woodland that a columbarium, with its more compact burial form, was built. Combining prefab

Studio di Architettura Zermani Associati   Italy   The major enlargement of a cemetery has combined a grammar of classical references with a bare materiality to give shape to spaces intended for the rites of final farewells. Emerging from the ground as a bold urban symbol honoring the memory of the d

Markus Schietsch Architekten   Switzerland   Stricter measures to maintain air quality and a decrease in the number of traditional burials led to the building of a new crematory, the design of which gives importance to the surrounding parkland. The facility is organized in concentric layers: fr

Bayer & Strobel    Germany   A small ceremonial space nestles under a pronounced pitched roof that rises high over the walls of the graveyard but engages in dialogue with their materiality. The spaces create a contemplative mood through the carefully choreographed entrance of li

Snøhetta Alfonso Penela   Spain   The new roof, inspired by the gracefulness of a veil in the wind, connects the volumes on both sides of the cloister and oversails the ruins to shelter them from the weather. The inner courtyard had a residual role, but now it distributes the spaces

Kengo Kuma   Spain   Taking advantage of its strategic position on the border of old town and the new city, the project seeks to become the green heart of Pontevedra. The light roof, inspired by the original one, articulates the whole complex and shelters the public area

David Chipperfield Architects Carlos Seoane   Spain   Part of Santa Clara street is integrated into the proposal to open the museum to the city without forgetting the cloistered nature of the convent. New construction work is minimal, because most of the intervention reorganizes and highlights the old b

KAAN Architecten   Spain   The east wing is expanded and containedly renovated with the aim of preserving the convent’s typology as much as possible. The west gallery for its part is more noticeably transformed into a two-story climate-controlled archaeological center...

Behet Bondzio Lin Architects    Taiwan   The cemetery in Hsinchu, known as ‘the wind city’, is located high up on Xiangshan Hill, overlooking the sea and exposed to gusts crossing the Taiwan Strait. Protected by an introspective concrete skin, the main volume harboring the columbarium is fo

Batlleiroig   Spain   The new facilities for Barcelona’s Nou Barris and Sant Andreu districts seek to blend into the context, creating a system of green spaces for the zone that emphasize pedestrian routes. The envelope is materialized in brick, playing with openwork and

ARQBR Arquitetura e Urbanismo   Brazil   This church built in concrete is located on the edge of EPIA (Park Road of Industry and Supply), a major component of the radio-centric thoroughfare system implemented to support the architect Lucio Costa’s Pilot Project. EPIA later became an express

Adjaye Associates   United Arab Emirates   On Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, the Abrahamic Family House headquarters has been inaugurated. It embodies the historical bonds linking three Abrahamic religions – Judaism , Christianity, and Islam – and provides a platform for dialogue and coexisten

Cabrera Arqs   Mexico   Meant to be a place for reflection, silence, and prayer, and for a community whose members practice different religions, this underground chapel disappears in the landscape of San Antonio Baspul, a locality within the municipality of Chicxulub Pueblo

TEd’A arquitectes   Belgium   The new church reconstructs a hillock that was located behind the second city wall of the 17th century, now disappeared. The old pit will be cleaned and emptied out to facilitate the formwork process of the future structure. The geometric halls of th

Plasencia Arquitectura   Spain   This refurbished building is located in the Mas Xirgu industrial complex, on the outskirts of Girona. The commission consisted in converting an industrial warehouse that was no longer in use into a funeral service building for the city. The original

Adjaye Associates   United Arab Emirates   The development of Saadiyat Island on Abu Dhabi’s northern coast is an ambitious tourist and cultural push to create a new center in the UAE capital. Besides various commercial and residential operations, the plan includes raising eight outposts of f

Adjaye Associates   Ghana   The recently refurbished gardens of the cemetery of Osu, a busy neighborhood east of the central district of Accra, is the site of the project for the new National Cathedral of Ghana. It will complete a ceremonial and scenic route through Osu Cemeter

Tadao Ando   France   This space was designed as a commemorative project for the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the UNESCO. The brief requested a ‘space of meditation’ for global peace, transcending all religions. The pavilion is located within the complex o

Tadao Ando   Japan   The temple of Water, the main one of Ninnaji Shingon, the oldest branch of tantric Buddhism in Japan, rests on a hill with views over Osaka Bay. The project proposes a sensory experience, a shift from the ordinary world to the sacred space. The appro

Tadao Ando   Japan   island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan. On a plain surrounded by mountain ranges and a dense forest of beech trees and shrubs, the building comprises two superposed cubes, a rectangular artificial lake, and a long L-shaped wall enclosing the complex.

Mario Cucinella Architects   Italy   A parish center located in the very heart of Calabria presents solutions for an architecture that is loaded with references but does not forget to incorporate sustainable mechanisms. The temple is fitted into a sinuous white volume around which the S

Miralles Tagliabue EMBT   Italy   The open and organic architecture of the parish marks a contrast with the heavy and compact center of the city with a radially undulating roof that reinterprets the archetypal form of Romanesque and Gothic aisles through nature.

Beautell Arquitectos   Spain   Since the closure, for security reasons, of the old Alcalá Church – finally demolished in 2011 – the neighbors have been determined to rebuild it. In response to this social demand, the Parish of Candelaria, the Bishopric, the regional Government, an

In a society that tends to be in denial about its inevitable finitude, being reminded that architecture is intimately tied to death can be considered unsavory. With our spaces placed at the service of production, our homes, pleasure, education, or th

Alberto Ballesteros   “Von Herzen zu Herzen gehen!” The sentiment Beethoven encoded in dedicating his Missa solemnis to Archduke Rudolph is what Paolo Zermani pursues with his most spiritual work. And if the composer of symphonies and sonatas, more than of oratorios, chan

A decade after his series of dense urban landscapes juxtaposed with cemeteries of Hong Kong, the photographer Manuel Álvarez Diestro presents images of graveyards in the Egyptian desert. Necropoli of Egypt captures surrealist compositions that reflec

In obstinate resistance to real estate speculation, the small early 20th-century St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church stood in the vicinity of the World Trade Center like an anachronistic residue of 1920s Manhattan, but was completely destroyed in the

The target of the air strike carried out on 1 March was a telecommunications tower outside Kyiv. At least five people died and another five were injured. Ruslan Kavatsiuk of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center informed The New York Times that the

A sicilian architect based in the city of Bologna, Mario Cucinella has designed a church devoted to St. Maria Goretti in Mormanno, a Calabrian town in the very heart of Pollino National Park. A cross is cut onto the surface of a sober white volume of

The Guardian   Stephen Burgen   Locals in Barcelona accuse religious foundation in charge of Gaudí‘s masterpiece of highhandedness. A gigantic 12-pointed star was installed on Monday on one of the main towers of the basilica of the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece that h

Advancing towards the heart of the USSR in the autumn of 1941, the Third Reich troops took Kiev on 19 September. A bit over a week later, the Einsatzgruppen C mobile death squads of the SS, with the collaboration of locals, murdered 33,771 Jews in th

In New York, in line with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the Santiago Calatrava-designed St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was lit for the first time. The original temple was totally destroyed when Tower 2 of the World Trade Center collapsed. Pr

Arnau Rovira shares his photographs of the municipal cemetery of Igualada (Barcelona), a work of Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, completed in the 1990s. The rites of passage between life and death are acted out on a stage where architecture blends wi

Albeit decimated during the Shoah and attacked on several occasions in recent times, the Jewish community of Belgium asserts its presence and importance in the country’s history by means of a small museum which in the wake of an international competi

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   The area around London’s Olympic Park is a regeneration hothouse with micro-breweries, tech startups, speakeasys and spas. Now their spiritual needs are being met – with a beautiful chapel on a barge. A narrowboat moored to the towpath is offering pa

For centuries architects were at the service of religious powers-that-be, and temples had priority over all other kinds of buildings. Maybe this explains why so many of today’s veterans are so eager to be commissioned to build churches and chapels. A

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At dusk on Monday, April 15th, just in time for the evening news, the world was treated to the horrendous spectacle of uncontrollable flames licking the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The fire spread from a scaffold that had been installed si

Dominique Perrault   Notre-Dame, the heart of the heart of Paris, treasure of the Île de la Cité, has just suffered one of the most trying moments in its long history. Across all lands and cultures of the world, this drama leaves us speechless, touching the hearts and ar

The New York Times   Aurelien Breeden   Elian Peltier   Liz Alderman   Richard Pérez-Peña   Exactly how the fire broke out is now the subject of an intensive investigation by the French authorities, who are so far treating the disaster as an accident. Much remains to be learned. But already it is emerging that Notre-Dame, irreplaceable as i

Cynthia Davidson   When  When Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi set in motion the Holy See’s first entry in the International Venice Architec-ture Biennale, which opened on 26 May 2018, he was building on the Vatican’s decades-old program to establish new alliances betwe

The Vatican is participating in the Venice Architecture Biennale, for the first time ever, with a proposal that is an updating of the old theme of religious propaganda, using a series of ten chapels designed by signature architects that are scattered

Kenneth Frampton   The illusory somewhat agricultural character of the Bagsværd Church, designed soon after Jørn Utzon’s return to Denmark from Australia, seems to confirm that in a secular age spiritual structures may be more effectively evoked through the evocation o

Joaquín Medina Warmburg   In the work of Eladio Dieste, whose birth has been one hundred years, technical ingenuity was placed at the service of the social program and Catholic fervor.

Soon after completing the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., David Adjaye has carried the day over 92 others in the competition for the UK National Holocaust Memorial in London. The monument will

Eduardo Prieto   Symbols of a dramatic epoch, modern monuments have had to revive an ancient function of architecture, perhaps its most essential one: remembering the dead. 

Luis Fernández-Galiano   We suffer memory disorders. Both individuals and societies need to balance memory and oblivion, defining personal or collective identity and at the same time clearing the mind to let the new come in. However, today we suffer from both excessive and e

Vittorio Ucceli   Paesaggio Sacro

Azra Aksamija   Building Pluralism

Ramón Rodríguez Llera   Arquitectura de las Misiones Jesuíticas en el Oriente Boliviano

Esteban Fernández-Cobián     2019  
Universidade da Coruña   - 246 Pages 

Caterina Cardamone   Larchitettura religiosa de Leon Battista Alberti

Javier Ortega Miguel Sobrino   Madrid  2017  
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte   - 332 Pages 

Eduardo Delgado Orusco   Arquitectura religiosa en España, 1950-1975

Paloma Gil   Barcelona  1999  
Ed. del Serbal   - 232 Pages 

Alberto Ferlenga (ed.) Paola Verde   le opere, gli scritti

Fernando Marías   Biografía de un pintor extravagante