Presentazione. La materia dello spazio sacro. Presentation. The matter of sacred space

Designing a church, for an architect, is an extraordinary event. It is not only necessary to perform the work properly as in the design of a rowhouse or of a multi-storey building, but it offers the chance to read much more heterogeneous materials, requiring then a high expression of choices, with a language that binds the multiple units, and an epic that pervades the work and communicates its clear values. The design of the sacred space, which is dealt within this publication is, in other words, one of the greatest themes in architecture, not only because it touches the most sensitive chords of the human soul, those of religious piety linked to the feeling of life and death, end of life and eternity, but for us architects, also because it suggests an aesthetic synthesis, the artistic character of the organism and the solidarity between the congruent spatial conception, the construction, and the roles that it is expected to play. All these essential components are organized and are not separable, i.e. they are collaborating with the same organism, according to two fundamental processes: the first, historical/ethical, the formation and transformation of the character of architectural organisms used for worship and the progressive updating and detection of each building by a community, implies the second, logical/economical, the successive transformations from the natural matter to the artificial architecture.