RUDOLF SCHWARZ. THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SACRED SPACE
ABSTRACT
The purpose of this research is to bring out the project range architect Rudolf Schwarz has developed from the end of the XIX century to 1961¹, while defining his own design theory about liturgical sacred space.
He is a man of broad vision, his thought is the emblem of a man living the space of reality, which discreetly pushes himself to the intelligible boundaries. His qualities as an architect or, as he prefers to call himself a "builder" of churches, express such dedication to the sacred that criticism has often overshadowed his enormous work on urban planning projects and the great quality of his museum buildings for the city of Cologne, just to mention the best known of his civil architecture. The management of his great cultural heritage, of his writings and above all, of his numerous projects, leads discreetly to establish some starting rules, knowledge guides of his work that generate one, or a series of, multiple interpretive possibilities of his work as architect and thinker.
By identifying the architectural types and their connection with history, liturgy and place, the wide architect’s project research is analysed and selected to a compendium of sixty churches, from which it is possibly to point out both the continuity with the previous experiences of the European traditional architecture, and particularly with the Rhineland one, and a positive contribution to the discussion on modern architecture.
The selected Schwarz’s sixty churches, projects and buildings, can be classified in different “architectural types”² : “Basilica” type; “Cruciform” type and “Hall” type. It is necessary to specify that this approach considers the several and complex modification and influences that are present in each project too.
With these types that Schwarz names “prototypes”³, as formal simplifications that need a typological choice while they are implemented, starting from the 20s, Rudolf Schwarz lays the groundwork for a general modern spatial and collective idea of the liturgical Christian rite celebration.
Some attention is also paid to the places where the projects are designed (urban morphological situation, location of the new sacred building in the existing urban fabric, urban perspectives that the new building generates).
Beside Rudolf Schwarz’s original documentation, drawings and iconographic material, this research uses a series of projects and project variants of a selection of churches, that have been reinterpreted, redesigned and reworked graphically
Purpose of the research is understanding how much the architecture and the sacred, the project and the liturgy coincide from an ideological and a formal point of view. Understanding how much the architecture, that is permeated by historically inherited shapes, is independent form the liturgical rite and how much at the same time it can suggest new liturgical possibilities, in a period when modernism and constant improvement of building technologies ensures new construction possibilities but also takes the risk of loss of values of the architectural space and of the relation between the meaning of architecture and its building.
[1] In this period a whole season of the modern movement in architecture coincides with an experimental pre-conciliar research on the renewal of the liturgical space.
[2] Antonio Monestiroli, L’architettura della realtà, Allemandi, Torino 2010, p.45-46.
[3] Rudolf Schwarz graduated in 1923 as doctor engineer at Technische Hochschule in Berlin, the with a thesis entitled Frühtypen der rheinischen Kleinkirche (Prototypes of small churches in Rhineland).
