A New Church in the Rising Sun: Saint Francis Xavier: Father Costantino Ruggeri, arch. Luigi Leoni

Luigi Leoni

doi:10.17979/aarc.2022.9.0.9347

Authors

Luigi Leoni Fondazione Frate Sole

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17979/aarc.2022.9.0.9347

Keywords:

Religious architecture, Japan, Yamaguchi, Saint Francis Xavier, Costantino Ruggeri

Abstract

Among the wealth of buildings consecrated to the Shinto religion, Yamaguchi has a Christian place of worship: the Sanctuary of Saint Francis Xavier. The lot chosen is the same on which the previous church stood, symbol of the city and destroyed by a fire in 1991. Consonances and relations could be found with spaces that have wished to express with force the tension towards the Absolute not only in our Western world but also in the spaces of Oriental architecture, in particular Japanese, where the striving towards that spoliation and essentialness of things that is, a bottom, a thirst for truth is perceived. Finally, our effort had as its aim to make the architecture speak a universal language of the hearth of man, rapt to the infinite desire to experience beauty and to find himself once again within it to have an authentic experience of interior joy.

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Author Biography

Luigi Leoni, Fondazione Frate Sole

He graduated in Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan in 1969 and began his professional activity in the Studio Ricerche Arte Sacra of Pavia together P. Costantino Ruggeri with the design of numerous churches, chapels, stained glass and sculptures in Italy and abroad. In the eighties he made numerous trips to Burundi for the realization of religious and social spaces in the mission land. In 1986 he opened a second professional studio in Pavia together architect Chiara Rovati. In the nineties with P. Costantino Ruggeri realizes the Sanctuary of St Francis Xavier in Yamaguchi in Japan and the new Sanctuary of Divine Love in Rome. After 2000 he carried out an intense planning activity, collaborating with the Franciscan Fathers of the Holy Land and the Studium Biblicum of Jerusalem for the realization of projects in Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Syria. In 2007 he succeeds Father Costantino Ruggeri as President of the Frate Sole Foundation and opens a workshop to continue with the creation of artistic stained glass and sacred furnishings.

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