and Monsignor Tighe were keen to stress that religious affiliation played no role in selecting either the curator or the participating architects. Indeed, the brief stated that each chapel had to contain just two liturgical elements – a pulpit and an altar – to represent, says Cardinal Ravasi, “The Word, and the bread and wine, which are the basis of Christianity”. Liturgical elements aside, many of the 10 chapels are masterclasses in the different ways of delineating contemplative space. Dal Co’s brief used the Swedish 20th-century architect Gunnar Asplund’s 1918-20 Woodland Chapel in Stockholm’s Skogskyrkogården as the basis for the commission, and the story of this structure is told within an 11th pavilion in Venice. “With [the Woodland Chapel] – a small masterpiece – Asplund defined the chapel as a place of orientation, encounter and meditation,” says Dal Co, adding that the structure seems “formed by chance or natural forces inside a vast forest, [and] seen as the physical suggestion of the labyrinthine progress of life, the wandering of humankind as a prelude to the encounter”. The word “encounter” is often used to mean an encounter with Christ in Christian discourse, though in its broader sense it can mean an enlightenment or transcendent experience. The “Culture of Encounter” is also one of the cornerstones of the papacy of Pope Francis. Broadly speaking, it means building bridges and relationships between Catholic congregations the world over and their sometimes non-Catholic neighbours. The idea is to reach out beyond the Church’s usual audience using cultural influence, and it is surely no coincidence that Dal Co’s model for the architects was a non-denominational 20thcentury chapel built in majority Lutheran Sweden. Furthermore, there’s nothing to mark out the resulting 10 structures as obviously Catholic, although the presence of crosses clearly identifies their Christian origins. The 10 chapels are splendidly diverse, ranging from a relatively traditional edifice designed by Japanese architect and critic Terunobu Fujimori, which perhaps most closely recreates Asplund’s chapel, through to Carla Juaçaba’s composition of polished stainless-steel bars. These bars intersect in the middle of a nearby meadow to form a row of benches beneath a gleaming cross. Visitors are free to roam between the chapels and explore them at will, just as they would roam Stockholm’s
Skogskyrkogården, although it must be said that the garden in which the chapels are placed does not afford the sense of being lost in a Nordic pine forest, and not all the chapels exude the quiet grace of Asplund’s prototype. Javier Corvalán’s boldly angled, hovering ring, consisting of plywood sheets attached to a robust steel frame, comes close to being the kind of grand gesture that became typical of Baroque churches, for instance. There is also some truth to Dal Co’s assertion that “the designers have been asked to come to terms with a building type that had no precedents
The brief stated that each chapel had to contain just two liturgical elements – a pulpit and an altar. or model”. While freestanding chapels do clearly exist – think roadside chapels or Peter Zumthor’s Bruder Klaus Field Chapel in Bavaria – the Vatican’s Venice ensemble seeks to question traditional models, with the architects free to choose their own references and narratives. Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, for instance, clearly drew inspiration from Antonello da Messina’s 15th-century painting St Jerome in his Study. Their chapel provides a kind of half-shelter from which to observe the world around them, but which nonetheless encloses the body, while a round opening in the chapel’s arch directs the first light of the morning onto the altar. Other architects indulge in their trademark moves. Foster + Partners’ chapel delights in showing off playful structural gymnastics, with two rows of timber slats undulating down from the structure’s slender steel frame. These slats focus the visitor’s gaze on the trees and lagoon beyond, and suggest a more outward-looking way of practising worship. Pluralism, which is so often the grassroots reality of any religious organisation, has been given concrete form. But it is perhaps Andrew Berman’s understated contribution that is the highlight: a mysterious prism clad in white polycarbonate, the interior painted black, with only a small opening letting through 152