Alessandro Bava
Wednesday, 1 October 2014
Work from City of God
“City of God is a book of poems by Harry Burke and architectural renderings by Alessandro Bava. The poems are a response to the architecture, which in turn illustrates an imagined mega-church and monastery for a post-bankruptcy Detroit.
Each drawing is like a poem, and each poem is like a space in which you can live. Each reading is like a confession. Together they build a city of belief, a City of God.
In the context of a bankrupt city, the project is a machine which isolates islands of Grace from the sea of Evil of sprawling urbanization. Sacred space is unveiled as one of the foundational elements of the American city (morally-politically-spatially), and a device to organize communities before and beyond the secular imperatives of production.The Temple of Jerusalem is the ur-type which is used to order the shrinking of Detroit at the urban scale, the spatial liturgy of the monastery, and the symbolic form of the Megachurch.”