Peripheral Architectural Hierophanies. Claudio Caveri’s Sacred Architecture

Abstract

With the development of secularizing modernity, the Sacred suffered a gradual retraction in its social, institutional and material expressions. However, architectural modernism built temples, one of the manifestations of the sacred or hierophanies according to Mircea Eliade. Among these architectural hierophanies are the churches of German liturgical functionalism for the liturgical movement of the early 20th century by the architects Dominikus Böhm and Rudolf Schwarz, and some of the Masters of modern architecture. A review of the studies on this religious architectural heritage, modern and contemporary, reveals that most of the research corresponds to a European heritage that expresses functionality, simplicity and purism. A functionalist modernist aesthetic that concentrates on the manifestation of the sacred. In an attempt to overcome this particular aesthetic concentration, we review the sacred heritage of the Argentinian architect Claudio Caveri, developed during the second half of the 20th century. His architectural hierophanies interpret the meaning of the sacred by appealing to symbolism and from a critical vision of the here and now of the southern periphery, through transdisciplinary reflections based on different thoughts of philosophers, religious and intellectuals such as Teilhard de Chardin, Kusch, Zubiri among others. In them, he explores a path of renewal, different from that of modern European religious architecture. The symbolic, aesthetic, functional and constructive properties of his sacred architecture seek to adapt to the historical demands of a peripheral Christianity in an experiential community commitment.