Rudolf Schwarz. La costruzione dello spazio sacro

The purpose of this research is to bring out the project range architect Rudolf Schwarz has developed from the end of the XIX century to 1961, while defining his own design theory about liturgical sacred space. He is a man of broad vision, his thought is the emblem of a man living the space of reality, which discreetly pushes himself to the intelligible boundaries. The selected Schwarz’s sixty churches, projects and buildings, can be classified in different “architectural types” : “Basilica” type; “Cruciform” type and “Hall” type. It is necessary to specify that this approach considers the several and complex modification and influences that are present in each project too. With these types that Schwarz names “prototypes”, as formal simplifications that need a typological choice while they are implemented, starting from the 20s, Rudolf Schwarz lays the groundwork for a general modern spatial and collective idea of the liturgical Christian rite celebration. Purpose of the research is understanding how much the architecture and the sacred, the project and the liturgy coincide from an ideological and a formal point of view. Understanding how much the architecture, that is permeated by historically inherited shapes, is independent form the liturgical rite and how much at the same time it can suggest new liturgical possibilities, in a period when modernism and constant improvement of building technologies ensures new construction possibilities but also takes the risk of loss of values of the architectural space and of the relation between the meaning of architecture and its building.