FONDAZIONE DELL’ORDINE DEGLI ARCHITETTI,
PIANIFICATORI, PAESAGGISTI E CONSERVATORI
DELLA PROVINCIA DI MILANO
Church of Nostra Signora della Misericordia / 1956-1958
/ Angelo Mangiarotti, Bruno Morassutti with Aldo Favini
“The cella, placed on a plinth, looks like
a solid block — 28 by 14 by 10 metres tall —
that is completely covered in glass panels
rendered translucent by the insertion of
sheets of polystyrene (…) on the inside. The
roof is supported by four tapered columns,
eight metres tall, that face the entrance and
support the two main beams and the six
secondary ones. Each beam is formed by
thirty X-shaped concrete blocks, joined and
prestressed in situ”.(1)
VIEW OF THE INTERIOR OF THE CHURCH (PHOTO BY STEFANO SURIANO)
Bh.142/itinerari
via Della Conciliazione 22-24, Baranzate
An essential language brings
architecture back to its origins: a base,
columns and roof. In the photos of the
construction, even when the glass volume
of the assembly hall, diaphanous and
translucent, had not been completed, the
Church of Nostra Signora della Misericordia
looks like a classical temple where the
pediment has been replaced by a sequence
of crosses in the building’s structure.
The non-structural perimeter glass walls
CHURCHES AND MODERNITY
Church of Nostra Signora della Misericordia / 1956-1958 / A. Mangiarotti, B. Morassutti with A. Favini
nearly make the building seem abstract in
its rigorous, geometric essentiality, while
the light — the project’s real “construction
material” — makes it vibrate: by day with a
diffuse candor, by night in an almost unreal,
irregular luminescence. The plinth that
rises within an area closed off by a concrete
and pebble wall — where there is the Way
of the Cross created by Gino Cosentino
— and houses a crypt, directly accessible
from the outside, isolates this iridescent
box, heralded by a simple cross. Inside,
everything is brought to an essentiality
THE BELL TOWER (PHOTO BY STEFANO SURIANO
that communicates through the reflections
of the perimeter walls: the baptismal font,
the double sequence of parallel pews and
the altar. Everything is linear, seemingly
in absence of gravity, without any hint of
ornamentation in order to make room for
the aesthetic importance of the structural
framework. It is “a building where the
unexpected transfiguration of space is given
by the absolute rigour of the structure. An
architecture in which technique is accepted
as the foundation of the building….”(2)
A unique and radical church, whose
restoration, by now necessary, has recently
opened a lengthy debate about the most
appropriate means of reconciling the
adaptation of its functionality to the logic
of a correct and proper conservation
and whose absolute value in the canon
of modern Italian architecture led the
Superintendence of Milan and DARC to
place it under the protection of architectural
constraints.
MARCO BORSOTTI
(1)G. Barazzetta, Milano anni ‘50: tecnica e architettura.
Morassutti, Mangiarotti, Favini in “Casabella” 721, LXVIII, April 2004.
(2) Idem.
CHURCHES AND MODERNITY