The Catholic Church is an institution, albeit an ancient one, but possessing colossal adaptive mechanisms that allow it to make each era its own in all respects, including with regard to architecture. It is easy for modern Catholic architecture to be modern without conflicting with tradition. And although the Church has ceased to be the main customer and consumer of architecture many centuries ago, churches and monasteries continue to be erected, and church building of the XX-XXI centuries is an extensive and fascinating chapter in the history of modern architecture.
At first glance, the new monastery of St. Catherine of Siena in the city of Paterna in the province of Valencia, built to replace the dilapidated old cloister for Dominican nuns, seems to be a completely neo-modernist building: minimalism, thoughtful geometry of laconic volumes, extensive glazed surfaces, asymmetric arrangement of openings on the facades, exquisite distribution of light flows, the use of concrete and other "new" materials. Even the landscape composition of the cloister is minimalistic - and therefore “modern”.
At the same time, in the solution of this new monastery there is nothing new or superfluous compared to the original concept and practice of Dominican architecture, formed in the 13th century, when the Dominicans, having concentrated enough funds in their hands, launched extensive construction, first in Italian cities, and then in other lands.
The Dominicans, one of the first mendicant orders, borrowed their architectural concept from the ascetic and rigorous Cistercians. Its main feature was radical minimalism, requiring the abandonment of any excesses (superflui), whether it be an unjustified enlargement of the size of buildings, the use where it is possible to do without them, vaults, as well as expensive floor cladding, stained glass windows, luxurious liturgical utensils and priestly robes, etc..d. And although subsequently each of these principles individually was repeatedly violated, they tried to preserve the general spirit of purism.
Neither this spirit nor the way of life of Dominican monasticism has undergone radical changes over 800 years. Therefore, in the 21st century, the structure of the monastery plan remained the same: the same set of premises: the so-called. daytime - a church, surrounded by administrative premises, a cloister, a refectory (refectory), a library, and nighttime - that is, a dormitory consisting of individual cells. In the XIII century. these principles were embodied in the forms of the Gothic, and, as then, in the plan of the modern monastery there are no curvilinear outlines.
Under the ban on decor, light became the main spiritual element of the architecture of the Dominican Order. In Valencia, the rectangular cuts of the windows in the church make it lie in even rectangles on the snow-white ceiling, the space is filled with reflections, reflected by polished marble floors and glass surfaces.
Avoiding historicism and quotation, the architect Pedro Hernandez Lopez and his bureau
Hernández Arquitectos very accurately recreated the original spirit of Dominican architecture: the emptiness and purity in which the contemplative life of modern nuns flows, this life without frills.
