Timelessness of symbolic space in religious buildings

Abstract

The announcement of the construction of a church in modern architecture by the cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon Manuel Cerejeira, which project was made by an architect who declared himself be secular caused a strong opposition in different sectors and personalities of the society, specially the president of the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes (colonel Arnaldo Ressano Garcia) and the architect Raul Lino as well as the prime-minister Oliveira Salazar who considered the new church uncarachterized. For this rejection greatly contributed the use of reinforced concrete and a flat roof both aspects considered by the conservative sectors of the regime and by the local Catholic hierarchy as symbols of modern architecture. However, Pardal Monteiro considered that the modernity of the new church stemmed from the interpretation of the program, the requirements of liturgical order translated in the composition of the interior space, revealing an array of permanence and continuity with tradition. For the architect was the largest architectural problem that had studied, not for the complexity of the program, but by its extraordinary simplicity and abundance of accumulated over two thousand years examples. Based on this case study as an opportunity to analyze the continuity and timelessness of the morphology of religious space, our goal is to advance this analysis by presenting the project to build a church in Urbanization of Portela in Lisbon as interrogative exercise of symbolic space and the problems and questions raised in contemporary times to the building of a church in the 3rd millennium.