Metaphor, beauty and contemporaneity in the sphere of worship

Second Panel Discussion

Abstract

As is the round table that will close these three days, and as I think that the feeling of most of the people who have attended this congress has been that they have had few opportunities to participate, we will try to make this the right time. There have been many issues that have come up, and I am not the person in charge of synthesizing them. But in any case, I'm going to make you a kind of flash of ideas that have been coming out. For example, the sacred architectural space as activator of the sacred experience. Binomials such as the metaphor-symbol relationship, temple-church, architecture-urbanism or functionalism-liturgy.
I remember that in the first congress we all left here on that day as today saying: the program is the liturgy. I do not say that then we would necessarily agree with this phrase, but in these sessions perhaps the claim of architecture has been launched. The architecture, and from the analysis of the problems, spoke of a radical functional analysis. But I'm not going to insist much more: nature, architecture, liturgy, there are many appropriate topics, but there are also other perspectives that converge, as for example in the case of the liturgy and in the case of worship, with images.
How do architecture and images dialogue in the definition of art or contemporary sacred space? Languages, techniques, materials, procedures ... the iconicity of the sacred image through the narrative episodes, the ritual episodes, the world of furniture, the world of stained glass, the world of liturgical objects, the world of the clothing, the synthesis of the arts. Could the architect move away or in some way get rid of the problems of iconicity in the sacred space? How do they dialogue, how do they debate?