Life in the Church. For a New Spiritual Landscape

Abstract

The essay addresses the theme of contemporary ecclesiastical architecture as a critical and design-oriented field, exploring the possibility of its renewed significance in today’s city. Starting from a provocative reflection on the crisis of the traditional church building type and the inadequacy of the parish center as an urban response, it investigates a concrete alternative: parabolic architecture. Through the projects developed within the research program “Church for the Future” — structured around three exemplifications: Creation, Generation, and Existence — and consolidated in a didactic workshop at the Politecnico di Milano, the essay proposes a new architectural figuration capable of engaging in dialogue with the city, embracing diversity, and becoming an experiential and spiritual place. The design interventions proposed in contexts of urban regeneration in Milan (Scalo Porta Romana, Santa Giulia) involve the experimentation with hybrid buildings and urban chapels as spaces of relationship and reconciliation. The use of generative artificial intelligence, presented in the study Spiritual A.I., further opens up unprecedented symbolic scenarios, reviving spatial liturgical imagination as a tool for urban transformation. It is an invitation to move beyond formal nostalgia and static functionalism, in order to restore a proactive role to religious architecture in the future of dwelling.