Church at the Border

nemzetközi konferencia előadás

Velencében kétévente, az Építészeti Biennálé nyitvatartásával párhuzamosan nemzetközi konferenciát rendeznek a  kortárs szakrális építészettel kapcsolatban. Az idei előadók között szerepel Vukoszávlyev Zorán is, aki a 20. századi magyar templomépítészet és kortárs templomépítés témában tart előadást Church at the Border címmel.

A 2010-es konferencia további felkért előadói: Andreas Meck mellett Albert Gerhards, Andrea dall’ Asta, Jannis Kounellis, Damjan Prelovsek és Fernando Pérez Oyarzun.

A konferencia szervező bizottsága: Esteban Fernández Cobián, Giorgio Della Longa, Antonio Marchesi, Walter Zahner.

Az alábbiakban közöljük a konferencia-absztraktot.

Részletesebben az idei konferenciáról, az idei év programjáról és a fővédnökséget adó velencei patriarchátusról a megjelölt honlapokon keresztül lehet tájékozódni.

Abstract:

“Hungary is on the historical ridge of Christianity. For centuries, this most eastern country of the Roman Catholic Church have been the combatant of faith located in the close vicinity of Muslim states. The constructing activity of the Church was unbroken even in the changing state-formations. In the 20th century the international modern architecture of Europe has been enriched with outstanding compositions in the church-architecture.

The progressive architectural style animated the new functional approach of the catholic reform movement as well: the composition of churches followed the functional arrangement of early Christian sacral space even between the two world wars. The dynamically developing Church employed the most well-known architect, in this way the national styles could also appear beside modernism: the romantic buildings emerging from secession and using traditional vernacular forms.

However, this enrichment in architecture was followed by an extreme decline after the end of the 2^nd World War. In the countries of the “eastern block”, getting under the influence of the Soviet Union, church construction activity approached zero. It was more shocking than the wartime damages and socialization that in the socialist era a church could only be built at the site of a demolished former church – the construction of a new building was only possible as the representative manifestation of the communist state. In the once prosperous East-European catholic country ideological oppression and even physical pogrom reigned for 40 years. In this atheist dictatorship Christianity was considered as something to be concealed.

The building activity of the Church slowly became tolerated after the election of John Paul II as pope, but the real break-through was the fall of the socialist block and the start of democratic changes. Beyond financial rehabilitation, the new freedom of soul was much more important – the gates of churches could be wide opened again, the houses of God were crowded for masses. The accelerated construction works in the first decade following1989 were typical for their search for style: to find the desired national character has led to several errors, while the traditions of modernism seemed to be a misunderstood language for a long time. Nevertheless, the constructions of the new decade show a more clarified picture.

Presently we live in the era of tradition being fulfilled. The recognized tradition addresses the believers in a contemporary language of forms, and they feel at home again in the churches. The goal of our study is to present these different languages. We consider the self-identification found in historical forms as well as the contemporary way of clear/minimalist architectural formation, manifested in abstraction. Are the quotations from vernacular architecture, the forms of classicism or the engineering aesthetics of modernism the most effective from the aspect of historical continuity of the Christian Church? Only after one decade can one notice the reconsidered production of architectural value, which is kind of re-interpretation of the broken development. In case of contemporary Hungarian churches, the pledge for architectural value has undertaken the continuation of tradition beside the aesthetic demands of the turn of the millennium; this tradition is tightly connected in its identity to the clear conception of liturgical spaces and to the re-definition of Christian space approach on the turn of the millennium. The catholic, calvinist and lutheran churches of Hungary built on the turn of the millennium represent the revival of tradition and the new architectural approaches at the same time.”