The Kind of Sacred the City Needs. A Teaching Experience of Architectural Design

Abstract

The essay is a report of a didactic experience, held in an Architectural Design Studio of an Italian school of architecture. For this experience, the focus of the studio were sacred halls. An artistically relevant residential district, built after the Second World War, in the periphery of an important Italian city was the site of the project which, through the construction of a church, a mosque and a synagogue, aimed at promoting intercultural dialogue and a political project for the city. Students’ work first faced a thematic reflection laying out on two different scales: the urban scale, in search of a relationship with the stratified city around, and the architectural scale. The latter, on one hand, concerned the possibility for architecture to express the sense of the sacred, and on the other it concerned the need to insert the halls in building complexes together with spaces intended for other social activities. Through the use of references, the typological choice guided the subsequent design phase, conferring on the building the character of appropriateness of form and theme recognized by its community.