Ten chapels in the park of the Vittore Branca Center on the edge of the island of San Giorgio Maggiore next to the "Green Teratro", make up the pavilion of the country of the Vatican - the papal Holy See, which for the first time participates in the Biennale of Architecture, although the experience of participating in the Venice Biennale of Art, in 2013 and 2015, disposes. Pavilion commissioner - Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, curator - Professor Francesco Dal Co, historian and publisher of Casabella magazine, invited 10 architects, on purpose from different countries and different degrees of "stardom", starting with Norman Foster and Eduardo Souto de Moura, and united each with the company - the manufacturer - architects and manufacturers are noted in the explications as co-authors.
The curator offered all participants a prototype - the Skogskapellet chapel in the southern Stockholm Woodland cemetery, built by Eric Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Leverenc in 1918-1920. In 1915, Asplund won the competition, then he was told that a stone chapel was very expensive to build, after which, inspired by the landscape of the Danish island of Møn, he built a wooden chapel, which he himself considered to be something between a chapel and a hut. However, there is also an Italian trace in Asplund's architecture, in Italy it was, - says Dal Ko.
So the eleventh pavilion-gatekeeper was added to the ten chapels, he meets those who enter and explains everything about Asplund and the chapel-prototype. The authors are the architects of the Venetian MAP studio Francesco Magnani and Traudi Pelzel.
Asplund considered the essence of the chapel "understanding, meeting, mediation, greeting" - this definition was proposed to all ten participants as a key topic. In addition, there is a pine forest in Sweden, and in Venice too. The entire space is interpreted as a "composite, distributed pavilion" - a project consisting of many chapels, but still one-piece. The chapels are also united by the obligatory presence of an altar and a pulpit. Otherwise, they are different, so different authors were deliberately chosen, including the Japanese Turinobu Fujimori, among the architects
there are even unbelievers. Differences in architectural language, constructive experimentation and a wide geography of countries, from Australia to South America, are intended to reflect the universal - and therefore "Catholic" - nature of the Church, according to a press release from the Vatican. It also says that traveling between chapels is a type of pilgrimage. Let's add, and the trip to the island to the chapels is also not like him, from the bustle of the exhibition to the silence.
Norman Foster
Crosses morphed into a Tensegrity Structure
Tecno, Terma, Maeg
It looks like a Pacific hut at the same time, only a large one, made of bolted boards, and a ship with metal masts, a basilica nave - so it combines three traditions at once. It is impossible to hide from the rain in it, and the sun leaves frequent stripes; but the sky is visible, and the lattice apse looks out onto the lagoon. In Foster's chapel, the only thing that matters is the path, the passage, it is strung on a wooden path.
At the opening ceremony, Foster's chapel was awarded a "papal dispensation", a kind of honorary diploma.
Eduardo Souto de Moura
No, it's not …
Laboratorio Morseleto
Spanish minimalism. Yellow Vicenta limestone of varying degrees of roughness, the cross is cut with thin lines in the wall, but the date MMXVIII is carved on the floor at the entrance in Roman numerals with serifs, and if it were not for the current year, one could imagine that this is a chapel of the Lombards on the ruins of the empire. The usual technique, already a classic one. According to the author, the great Portuguese architect, this is not a chapel, not a sanctuary or a tomb, but only the space between the four walls, although the central stone may be an altar. The volume includes a tree at the entrance.
Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats
The Morning Chapel
The most postmodern, reminds Mario Botta - apparently because it is terracotta and with round windows. The hometown of architects is Barcelona, which is acutely felt.
Nearby there is a long brick bench, and you can enter inside conditionally: the chapel seems to be cut in half, which somewhat resembles a bus stop. Meanwhile, it is the most Mediterranean of all. There are two round windows in the arch, one large "Renaissance" one in the tympanum, it looks to the east, the first morning sunbeam passes through it. Another window is in the cheek of the arch, facing south. A “door to the forest” has been cut in the wall adjacent to the arches.
Smiljan Radic
A chapel as a roadside shrine
Moretti & Saint-Gobain Italia
Chilean
the Serbian-born architect, the author of the 2014 Serpentine Pavilion in the form of a giant pebble, built a gray cylinder from factory-made reinforced concrete under a glass ceiling on iron legs. Inside, there is a deep perforated formwork on the walls and floor, the cross is made of a crooked wooden trunk carrying a metal I-beam. The name brings to mind our Russian roadside crosses at the accident sites and ancient stone tombs of Asia Minor.
Javier Corvalan
Nomadic Chapel
Simeon
A large wooden disc, set at an angle on iron legs and bears at the top of a strange kind of three-dimensional six-pointed cross, more like a symbol of three-dimensional space. All together it looks like a UFO ship.
Francesco Cellini
Not a project; thinking / Not a project; a reflexion
Panariagroup
Also a chapel-hole, only metal and rectangular. It is crossed by a transverse "pillar" with a metal sculpture of the book. Benches are at the edges. Allusions with a frame in space and the play of simple volumes are obvious.
Karla Huacaba
A bench and cross
Secco Systemi
The chapel of the Brazilian architect is a bench, as indicated by the inscriptions around on the tables; usually they are used for prohibitions, and here - sit down, please, then a bench. The base of the metal cross lies, like a tie, on concrete beams, and then rises upward with a giant crossbar. Due to the fact that the metal is polished, the cross is almost invisible from a distance.
Sean Godsel
Relocatable Chapel
Maeg & Zintek & Nice
An industrial-grade square tube opens up hydraulically at the bottom. Outside it is gray, inside it is yellow, under the chimney is an aluminum altar. It seems to be a tower above the cross, and yet it is still a pipe. But the project is beautiful and attractive - at least in that it attracts people to come and look up.
Andrew Berman
A precise form of anonymous origin
Moretti and terna
Triangular; the entrance is blocked by a black wall, inside there is a very simple altar and music stand made of light wood.
Terinobu Fujimori
Cross Chapel
LingoAlp & Barth Interni
The chapel of the Japanese architect is most of all traditional, at first it looks like a house in the forest or "just a chapel", which brings it closer to the Stockholm prototype. Portico of crooked, raw barrels, black; the narrow opening of the entrance allows the outside to see a golden cross on the wall inside, symbolizing the Cross of Christ's Ascension. Having squeezed through the crack, we find ourselves in what is perhaps a very traditional chapel with wooden benches and white walls. The aura of black sparkles on the wall also, apparently, symbolizes the glow of the Ascension mandorla that disperses the darkness.
