Interview with Álvaro Siza on Saint Mary´ s Church in Marco de Canaveses

Abstract

What I consider to be most significant in this project, as the most influential, is a debate that exists today about the space of the church. And when I say today I say after the Second Vatican Council. Because the significant questions of the liturgy that affect the space of the church are in a period of a certain instability or uncertainty. I noticed the existence of a first phase in which the predominant in most of the projects carried out is a sense of unity of the assembly with the celebrants and a good visibility: a democratic space, so to speak. And the solutions were tending towards an amphitheater. What seems to me that dominated that first phase of response to the conciliar modifications was the consideration of the church as an audience. And there, it seems to me - in short, for me to be, for my sensibility - that something was lost from the atmosphere of a church that is difficult to extinguish, because it comes from centuries of achievements. On the one hand it happens that the historical buildings, the wonderful historical buildings, are no longer useful for the post-Vatican Council II project; but from my point of view, you can not lose all that.