Kéré Architecture   Burkina Faso   In Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, the mausoleum for Thomas Sankara has been inaugurated. It pays tribute to the country’s revolutionary former president and twelve officials close to him, all assassinated in 1987 during a coup d’êtat. The

Santamaria Arquitectes   Spain   The Church of Sant Esteve, located at the eastern end of the Barcelona municipality of Marganell, sharing its grounds with a cemetery, retains much of its Romanesque structure despite all the looting, fires, and revamps it has undergone over the cent

Diller Scofidio + Renfro   Qatar   Located in Education City in Doha, Al-Mujadilah is a religious, educational, and social center for Muslim women. Conceived by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, who presides the Qatar Foundation (QF), and designed by the New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Liu Jiakun   China   Erected after the devastating earthquake that struck Wenchuan – a county in China’s Sichuan province – in 2008, this memorial honors Hu Huishan, a 15-year-old high-schooler who perished in the cataclysm. The pavilion’s shape recalls the emergency ten

Rubén Valdez   Mexico   A circular enclosure, semi-buried in the terrain, fuses symbolically with the landscape of Todos Santos, in the South Baja California Desert. This discreet project, commissioned by Paradero Hotels, harbors a 185-square-meter non-religious ceremony sp

Kengo Kuma   France   The final prototypes have been approved to begin the prefabrication of the 660 pieces that will form the future gallery. Each concrete element, made of white cement, sand, and aggregates from the Loire basin, will be cast and polished. The project ca

Studio Morphogenesis   Bangladesh   This mosque, built in concrete pigmented with reddish tones, is located in a fast-growing industrial area of Ashulia, on the outskirts of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. A factory owner decided to build it for his employees and in memory of his dec

Serie Architects   India   The Shrimad Rajchandra Ashram in Dharampur, in the Indian state of Gujarat, is a complex devoted to the teachings of the Jainist philosopher and spiritual leader Shrimad Rajchandra (1867-1901), based on non-violence and ascetissm. The building compl

Padilla Nicás arquitectos   Spain   This 105-square-meter chapel is located at the heart of the new building on the Madrid campus of the IESE Business School. The project seeks to accentuate this central position through a curvilinear geometry, with concave formations conducive to conc

KSP Engel   Algeria   Africa’s largest mosque, located in Algiers, was inaugurated in February 2024. The prayer hall fits 36,000 faithful and the complex takes in 120,000 visitors. Th svelte minaret soars 265 meters and features a viewing platform at the top. Given the se

Ángela García de Paredes Rafael de La Hoz   Spain   A university residence run by the Dominican order presents a rigorous composition of brick volumes that nevertheless maintain a certain degree of formal autonomy. The bedrooms take up the vertical block, arranged in pairs along continuous balconies,

Angelo Candalepas and Associates   Australia   A small lot in Punchbowl, a residential neighborhood in Sydney, is the site of the new home of the Australian Islamic Mission, a complex of buildings whose purpose is to facilitate learning and religious worship for local Muslims. The completed first

Andrea Dragoni   Italy   In the countryside of the central Italian region of Umbria lies Valfabbrica, a village of medieval origin. The municipal cemetery outside the historic center was recently enlarged by Andrea Dragoni. It closes towards the new high-traffic road from wh

IXA   Czech Republic   The Prague-based firm IXA has turned a farm in Lošany into a monument commemorating three resistance periods of modern Czechoslovakian history. The circumstances around the formation of these movements are recounted through the story of several gener

João Luís Carrilho da Graça   Portugal   A Manueline abbey gains back its original configuration when freed of additions made over time that overburdened its loadbearing structure and had the effect of distorting its simple proportions.

Eduardo Souto de Moura Luís Peixoto   Portugal   The 18th-century edifice that completed Portugal’s largest monastery now harbors a hotel establishment that endeavors to highlight the value of the heritage site without stagnating it.

Álvaro Siza   Portugal   In establishing its foundation, Porto’s most famous bookshop makes one of the country’s earliest constructions coexist with a sculptural pavilion that echoes its volumes on a contemporary note. The premises were reconstructed in the 20th century unde

Níall McLaughlin Architects   Ireland   In the vicinity of Grafton Street, which is one of Dublin’s busiest and most popular thoroughfares, St Teresa’s Church offers a peaceful space for contemplation and worship amid the urban turmoil. Beside it is the priory, home to a congregation of Ca

Níall McLaughlin Architects   United Kingdom   Slightly hidden away from the busy junction at the corner of Church Street in the Kensington neighborhood, the Carmelite monastery needed to carry out various works to preserve and enlarge its facilities, adding a private chapel and a new sacristy. T

SOA architekti Ateliér Koncept   Czech Republic   The Czech city of Aš – close to the bank of the Ohře, a tributary of the Elbe River, and to the German border – has a Park of Memories that harnesses the area’s geographical and symbolic potential. The objective of the project was to honor the past a

Fernando Carrascal José María Fernández de la Puente Juan Antonio Mesa Cadena   Spain   Declared an Asset of Cultural Interest in 1978, the Chruch of Santa Ana de Carmona is part of a group of 16th-century religious buildings. In 1975, the single-nave temple with a Latin cross plan fell into disuse and its two roofs (Mudejar and Baroque

Medprostor    Slovenia   The Slovenian architecture firm Medprostor – founded by Jerneja Fischer Knap, Rok Žnidaršič, and Samo Mlakar – carried out this intervention that included a movable, foldable roof to preserve the remains of the Romanesque church of the Carthusian mon

Elisa Valero   Spain   Located on the outskirts of Granada, in the Almanjáyar neighborhood, this church presents a jagged profile with seven skylights on a sawtooth roof projecting a play of lights and colors inside. Developed over a span of fourteen years, the project aim

The Frate Sole Foundation has awarded the Canarian architect Fernando Menis with the 2004 International Prize for Sacred Architecture for the Church of the Holy Redeemer of Las Chumberas in La Laguna (Tenerife), which was chosen from among 128 design

To think of monasteries and Portugal is to think of the novel Memorial do Convento (published in English as Baltasar and Blimunda), where in Baroque prose José Saramago intertwined the pursuits of a group of heterodox characters with the construction

In a society that tends to be in denial about its inevitable finitude, being reminded that architecture is intimately tied to death can be considered unsavory. With our spaces placed at the service of production, our homes, pleasure, education, or th

Alberto Ballesteros   “Von Herzen zu Herzen gehen!” The sentiment Beethoven encoded in dedicating his Missa solemnis to Archduke Rudolph is what Paolo Zermani pursues with his most spiritual work. And if the composer of symphonies and sonatas, more than of oratorios, chan

A decade after his series of dense urban landscapes juxtaposed with cemeteries of Hong Kong, the photographer Manuel Álvarez Diestro presents images of graveyards in the Egyptian desert. Necropoli of Egypt captures surrealist compositions that reflec

In obstinate resistance to real estate speculation, the small early 20th-century St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church stood in the vicinity of the World Trade Center like an anachronistic residue of 1920s Manhattan, but was completely destroyed in the

The target of the air strike carried out on 1 March was a telecommunications tower outside Kyiv. At least five people died and another five were injured. Ruslan Kavatsiuk of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center informed The New York Times that the

A sicilian architect based in the city of Bologna, Mario Cucinella has designed a church devoted to St. Maria Goretti in Mormanno, a Calabrian town in the very heart of Pollino National Park. A cross is cut onto the surface of a sober white volume of

The Guardian   Stephen Burgen   Locals in Barcelona accuse religious foundation in charge of Gaudí‘s masterpiece of highhandedness. A gigantic 12-pointed star was installed on Monday on one of the main towers of the basilica of the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece that h

Advancing towards the heart of the USSR in the autumn of 1941, the Third Reich troops took Kiev on 19 September. A bit over a week later, the Einsatzgruppen C mobile death squads of the SS, with the collaboration of locals, murdered 33,771 Jews in th

In New York, in line with the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the Santiago Calatrava-designed St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was lit for the first time. The original temple was totally destroyed when Tower 2 of the World Trade Center collapsed. Pr

Arnau Rovira shares his photographs of the municipal cemetery of Igualada (Barcelona), a work of Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, completed in the 1990s. The rites of passage between life and death are acted out on a stage where architecture blends wi

Albeit decimated during the Shoah and attacked on several occasions in recent times, the Jewish community of Belgium asserts its presence and importance in the country’s history by means of a small museum which in the wake of an international competi

The Guardian   Oliver Wainwright   The area around London’s Olympic Park is a regeneration hothouse with micro-breweries, tech startups, speakeasys and spas. Now their spiritual needs are being met – with a beautiful chapel on a barge. A narrowboat moored to the towpath is offering pa

For centuries architects were at the service of religious powers-that-be, and temples had priority over all other kinds of buildings. Maybe this explains why so many of today’s veterans are so eager to be commissioned to build churches and chapels. A

Luis Fernández-Galiano   At dusk on Monday, April 15th, just in time for the evening news, the world was treated to the horrendous spectacle of uncontrollable flames licking the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. The fire spread from a scaffold that had been installed si

Dominique Perrault   Notre-Dame, the heart of the heart of Paris, treasure of the Île de la Cité, has just suffered one of the most trying moments in its long history. Across all lands and cultures of the world, this drama leaves us speechless, touching the hearts and ar

The New York Times   Aurelien Breeden   Elian Peltier   Liz Alderman   Richard Pérez-Peña   Exactly how the fire broke out is now the subject of an intensive investigation by the French authorities, who are so far treating the disaster as an accident. Much remains to be learned. But already it is emerging that Notre-Dame, irreplaceable as i

Cynthia Davidson   When  When Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi set in motion the Holy See’s first entry in the International Venice Architec-ture Biennale, which opened on 26 May 2018, he was building on the Vatican’s decades-old program to establish new alliances betwe

The Vatican is participating in the Venice Architecture Biennale, for the first time ever, with a proposal that is an updating of the old theme of religious propaganda, using a series of ten chapels designed by signature architects that are scattered

Kenneth Frampton   The illusory somewhat agricultural character of the Bagsværd Church, designed soon after Jørn Utzon’s return to Denmark from Australia, seems to confirm that in a secular age spiritual structures may be more effectively evoked through the evocation o

Joaquín Medina Warmburg   In the work of Eladio Dieste, whose birth has been one hundred years, technical ingenuity was placed at the service of the social program and Catholic fervor.

Soon after completing the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., David Adjaye has carried the day over 92 others in the competition for the UK National Holocaust Memorial in London. The monument will

Diego Peris Sánchez   1942-1991

Vittorio Ucceli   Paesaggio Sacro

Azra Aksamija   Building Pluralism

Ramón Rodríguez Llera   Arquitectura de las Misiones Jesuíticas en el Oriente Boliviano

Esteban Fernández-Cobián     2019  
Universidade da Coruña   - 246 Pages 

Caterina Cardamone   Larchitettura religiosa de Leon Battista Alberti

Javier Ortega Miguel Sobrino   Madrid  2017  
Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte   - 332 Pages 

Eduardo Delgado Orusco   Arquitectura religiosa en España, 1950-1975

Paloma Gil   Barcelona  1999  
Ed. del Serbal   - 232 Pages 

Alberto Ferlenga (ed.) Paola Verde   le opere, gli scritti

Fernando Marías   Biografía de un pintor extravagante