Chapels inspire soul-searching over selfies
The Vatican’s first exhibit at the Venice Biennale is a place for both non-believers and believers, says Jonathan Glancey
Ambitious airports. Multi-million dollar offices. Innovative skyscrapers. In many eyes, over the course of 50 years Norman Foster’s adventurous buildings have come to symbolise heroic materialism: his new head office for Apple is said to have cost an eye-opening £4 billion.
So it comes as a surprise to discover the identity of Foster’s latest client – the Vatican. Set among sun-dappled trees on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Foster’s latest building is a temporary timber and steel chapel – one of 10 commissioned for the Holy See’s first contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale.
As a full scale and permanent church, the chapel – composed of steel masts and cables, larch wood slats, stylised crosses and open-air views to the Venetian Lagoon – would be rather beautiful. As a model of what a contemplative sanctuary might be for anyone, religious minded or not, it is an architectural gem and the high point of the Holy See Pavilion.
Intended to spark a discussion about the Church and its relationship with modern design, these chapels, all created by contemporary architects from around the world, are perhaps the most engaging exhibits of this year’s show.
The commissioner of the Holy See Pavilion is Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council of Culture, who led tributes to both David Bowie and Lou Reed at the time of their deaths, but is no fan of much recent ecclesiastical art and design.
Churches, says Ravasi, have “copied the styles of the past, or worse we have adapted to the ugliness of the new suburbs and aggressive building schemes, raising sacred edifices that are devoid of spirituality or any encounter with new artistic and architectural languages.”
So, here, in the pinewood of San Giorgio, a secret garden in this intensely built up city, is a decalogue of chapels speaking, from a design point of view, in a host of tongues, yet each reinforcing the message of the others. This project, says Ravasi, “is a way to engage with those who maybe would never go to church, but still ask the same questions as believers”.
And how they came to the opening of the Holy See Pavilion, vaporetti pressed to their limits and low in the
This project is a way to engage with those who never go to Church but still ask the same questions as believers
water, as if visitors to the Biennale were pilgrims in search of the numinous or absolution rather than Prosecco and architectural novelty.
The project is a continuation of a Vatican initiative of Pope Benedict XVI establishing a dialogue between the Catholic Church and “non-believers” across 16 cities in Europe and the US. Ravasi gave the brief to create a Venetian “Courtyard of the Gentiles” – a modern equivalent to the public space built by King Herod in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago – to Prof Francesco Dal Co of the Venice University of Architecture and Dr Micol Forti of the Vatican Museums.
The architects commissioned are as different as Spain’s Flores & Prats, designers of the glass and metal Microsoft office building in Milan, and Japan’s Terunobu Fujimori, a cultural commentator known for eccentric creations such as the Dandelion and Chocolate houses in Kokubinji, Tokyo.
To find a common ground for the project, the architects were asked to consider the 1920 Woodland Chapel, in Stockholm, by the Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, a model of how a new religious building can be a place of solace and inspiration for anyone and everyone. These chapels are reached beyond a new shingle pavilion, designed by Venetian architects Francesco Magnani and Traudy Pelzel of MAP Studio, devoted to an explanation of Asplund’s chapel. The chapel by New York architect Andrew Berman is a clear homage to Asplund’s Woodland Chapel, while Carl Juaçaba of Rio de Janeiro has laid out a sequence of overlapping stainless steel crosses that barely rise above ground. Her chapel, she says, “can disappear at certain moments depending on the reflections of the sun and the trees.”
The other chapels are by Javier Corvalan Espinola of Paraguay, Chile’s Smiljan Radic and the Portuguese Pritzker Prize laureate Eduardo Souto de Moura. Together, says the Vatican, the choice of architects reflects “the universal – indeed catholic – nature of the Church.”
Australia’s Sean Godsell has built a bell tower chapel like an upended shipping container overshadowing pews made from recycled mooring poles. Its crisp corner posts are references, says the architect, to the refined steel structures of Mies van der Rohe who intoned, “God is the details”.
No bells ring from Godsell’s godly tower. Perhaps they might upset guests at the Cipriani, the sumptuous Venetian hotel luxuriating across the water from the Holy See Pavilion. “We live in hope”, says Godsell, “that, once relocated, they may be included and enjoyed in the chapel’s permanent home”.
The plan is for the chapels to be offered, after the Biennale closes in the autumn, to towns and villages affected by earthquakes and other natural disasters.
One of the great glories of Venice is her wealth of churches. How daring their design, how angelic their engineering. And yet, in a city of extreme casual dress, aggressively informal manners and intrusive selfie-sticks, how often these great churches can feel like abandoned museums or secular playthings.
This year, the Vatican is hoping for reconciliation between the secular and sacred worlds in an island grove of innovative and temporary chapels.
If only visitors to Venice in search of theirs and the city’s largely lost soul could be greeted with the peal of bells from Godsell’s chapel, rather than with the chatter of selfie-takers absorbed by wholly secular spectacle.
16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, until 25 Nov; labiennale.org