Description

Catholic Europe is dotted with a series of pilgrimage destinations visited each year by vast numbers of pilgrims. They visit the place where a famous saint has lived or worked to pray and implore him for help and guidance. In contrast to popular opinion, Lourdes in France and Fátima in Portugal are not the most visited pilgrimage destinations in Europe but San Giovanni Rotondo in Apulia, one of the poorer regions in southeast Italy. Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar, was already venerated during his lifetime, and in the years since his death in 1968 and his canonisation in 2002, the number of pilgrims has risen steadily with each year. In 2004 it is estimated that some seven million guests visited San Giovanni Rotondo.

Like an acropolis, the new complex, built in commemoration of the friar, commands a prominent position on a hill over its strangely disparate surroundings. The commercial exploitation of pilgrimage – hotels and restaurants jostle to make the most out of the pilgrims’ devotion – has devastated the urban and rural structure of the immediate vicinity. As such, the new complex only makes reference to the 17th-century basilica Santa Maria delle Grazie at the east end of the site and clearly delineates the boundary to the south. Classical colonnades form a giant retaining wall screening off the “junk space” to the south, to borrow a phrase from Rem Koolhaas. From below, one sees little of the complex and from above little of what lies below. Once on the plateau above, one leaves the city behind, the view straying across the distant landscape of the Adriatic coastline and towards the heavens.

Every pilgrimage is a procession from station to station. In San Giovanni Rotondo, too, there is a fixed route. It leads from the road at the foot of the hill, through a colonnade up to a square, from there into the lower storey of the church for confession and to learn about the saint and his activities, then into the church for Mass and finally into the crypt for prayer – Padre Pio’s tomb is the culmination of the pilgrimage – before finally exiting to the rear of the church.

The entrance to the colonnade is also the entrance to the pilgrimage site. It is marked by a 40 metre high cross and an open horizontal carillon of eight bells that sound an entire octave from C to C at the top of the retaining wall. The first arcade of the 100 metre long passageway, closed to the left, open to the right, has a height of 25 metres. As the path slowly rises – the steps are widely spaced and the incline gentle – the pillars become smaller and smaller. The perspective of the colonnade ends at two stairs to the left that lead to the highest point at the edge of an expansive plateau. A 9000 square metres elongated triangle, it is large enough to accommodate up to 30,000 people. At the bottom of the slightly inclined square stands the church.

The most characteristic element of the building – its sweeping arches and oversailing roof – is immediately apparent. Its amphitheatre-like interior is, however, only visible after passing through the row of doors in the high entrance screen. The semicircular form of the room is structured by two sets of shallow stone arches that fan out radially; the inner arches are larger, the outer arches smaller. The inner and outer rows of arches overlap partially, gradually becoming lower with each rotation, giving the impression of a descending spiral, not unlike that of a flat sea or snail shell. The structural elements of the architecture concentrate the space inwards toward the primary liturgical focus. The sweeps of the arches direct one’s eye to the altar, behind which the cluster of arches appear to spring out of the ground, dividing the half-circle into nine sections. The result is a church with multiple naves providing sufficient space for 6500 believers in two sets of four blocks of pews and with an aisle that leads from the rear to the front of the church, from the baptistry to the presbytery.

The architect was initially sceptical about accepting the commission for the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church. The entire programme, its consequences for the urban environment and the building seemed too immense and problematic. From the beginning it was clear the church was to be built in stone but that it was not to appear solid and heavy. Instead, the desire was to achieve a lightweight, almost effortless structure. With the help of the engineer Peter Rice, a structure inspired by the Gothic master builders of old was created, a tour de force of stone segments whose dynamic forms are reminiscent of the large winding stone staircases of castles and forts built between the Gothic and the Renaissance.

The precise forms of the rough blocks of the light brown, lime-rich Bronzetto d’Apricena, mined from the vicinity of San Giovanni Rotondo, were first computer calculated and then cut to size in Carrara. The permissible tolerance lay by half a millimetre. Five or six such blocks were then bonded together, bored lengthways to receive several steel cables before being brought into place. The stones withstand the compression, the cables tension: like a taut necklace, each arch retains its shape. The internal tensioning of each of the 21 arches – with spans of between 38 and 50 metres and heights of between 11 and 16 metres – is not just an example of technical finesse but an important stabilisation measure for a building visited by masses of people in an earthquake-prone region such as Apulia.

The “aula liturgica”, as the architect calls his building, has a varied roofscape that in some respects resembles the shell of a turtle. It consists of a series of scales covering a total surface area of 19,500 square metres, each clad in patinated green copper. From the square one sees four large scales falling away to the left, on the right three in the foreground and four further behind falling away to the right. The scales rest on timber purlins borne by V-shaped­ steel struts, which in turn rest on the stone arches.

As with the St Pius X Basilica in Lourdes, a subterranean concrete building constructed in the fifties by Pierre Vago, the Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church has the character of a stadium and a theatre, although every attempt has been made to reduce the size and mass of the necessarily large building. Architectural critics have noted similarities with the work of Bruce Goff and Pier Luigi Nervi, but only after first drawing parallels between Piano’s technologically advanced architecture and ancient heathen burial mounds. After all, the Tumba Padre Pio in the crypt beneath the altar is the focus of the entire complex and also the source of the arches arcing over the congregation – not just structurally but also spiritually. A conical funnel over the altar punctures the copper roof to the left and the right, shedding light onto the altar. One is reminded of expressive baroque reliefs in which the graves burst open to show the awakening of the corpses on the day of the Last Judgement. This perhaps also explains the reason why the glass surface over the main entrance to the church, a 50 square metres large upright panel, is due to be replaced by an artwork by Robert Rauschenberg depicting the Apocalypse.

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.