Gruppo BISACCIA

Faced with the Catholic Church of the "Sacred Heart of Jesus Life and Resurrection" we are faced with a different idea of the church as conceived in history and ordinariness, an apparently bizarre church. We do not dive into the puzzle of architectural styles and cultures, the explanation lies in the essential and intuitive intelligence of the people of Bisaccia, which they summarize with combinations of real life objects, they called this church "the basin", that is the vessel to contain water, used mainly for washing clothes and which has large walls, a bottom and a wider mouth. Yes, here is the synthesis, the basic idea to understand the whole, and the basin in geomorphology is a terrestrial depression with a semicircular shape and raised slopes. Looking closely at the ecclesial architecture, the apse includes arches or vaults, a semicircular plan. The apse is covered by a vault, called the conca or basin, a semi-dome (a quarter of a sphere). And so is this church too. Inside, it is circular, a furniture sparse with icons, but full of light, as if even every shadow were to disappear, and a long spiral of uniform, elegant benches. A public space for an assembly, no longer immersed in a disciplinary culture, but in a proposal for commitment, which offers its own contribution as for a cultural and social project of works that serve the person. A space as built for a sort of new integral and supportive humanism, to advance a utopia, to fight the uncertain fate of democracy in the global world, for a gymnasium for participation in reflection and community creation, to put forward a proposal, without canons and prohibitions, of democracy.

Designed by the architect Aldo Loris Rossi, born in Bisaccia in 1933, and built with funds from the postearthquake of 1980, the external structure descends, rises, breaks down and reassembles, enters and protrudes, it seems that it adjusts itself with the imagination in futuristic volumes, in overlapping terraces that are usable and functional as rooms for oratories, seminar works, complete homes for staff and occasional guests, even allowing rainwater to be collected outside. Roundness is everywhere, the curved line predominates, the lobed, almost as if to say: functional yes, but caressing, without edges, welcoming. Then at the top stands the long Gothic pinnacle with a triangular pyramid, it comes out of the body and turns the church to the sky, to God. The space then becomes dynamic development in height with a futuristic and organic shape to a church. An elementary colored and three-dimensional spaceship that reflects light, a lighthouse, visible from long distances, an infinite and indefinite power. It is an original religious building of recent construction, located in Bisaccia Nuova, the seat, starting from June 1998, of the “Sacred Heart of Jesus Life and Resurrection” parish community. Its particular constructive and aesthetic technical characteristics attract university students from abroad. The high bell tower borders on forty meters. Another feature, this internal vault, is the location of the “amphitheater” benches.

Aldo Loris Rossi

1990

Piazza della Concordia, Bisaccia (AV)

The Church belongs to the Archdiocese of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi, Conza, Nusco and Bisaccia.

Despite the opening to the public in 1998, the church requires ordinary and extraordinary maintenance due to the deterioration of the reinforced concrete and infiltration of rainwater

The elegant futuristic volumes of the new Church of Bisaccia highlight the architectural form with a central plan of the sacred building, entirely based on the compositional dictates formulated by the Second Vatican Council, while illustrating the minimalist choice adopted for the placement of a few accessories and furnishings sacred, limited to only four significant icons arranged in strategic points of the circular assembly space of the Church. Aldo Loris Rossi's “Plan” generates awe and wonder. It is important to understand the origins of a project, the centrality of a public place along which the neighborhoods branch off, a city designed to have functionality, without forgetting the identity of a place. The use, according to many disproportionate, of concrete, which was however an innovative material of the time in which the work was carried out, has in no way upset a concept that is purely bisaccese, of low houses, on two levels, as in the historic center, whose morphological composition, foresees the door-window scheme on the façade, with the circular element projecting onto the façade that concealed the fireplace inside. From the city to the building, his method involves centrality, linked to the structural supports, often cylindrical in shape, the pillars in the building, the public "elements" in the city, around which all the residential architecture unfolds. The Church, for example, (the so-called spaceship) which, with the circular central plan, expresses the maximum of a sacredness linked to the community united in prayer in the religious space. The pillars, load-bearing, circular elements, as in the multifunctional center, are often cables, containers of technical elements, systems and ducts, of vertical circulation, of technical networks. The word brutalism defines an architectural current seen as the overcoming of the Modern Movement in architecture. The term was born in 1954 in England (Brutalism) and derives from Le Corbusier's béton brut, which characterizes the "Unité d'Habitation" (1950) in Marseille, and in particular from a phrase in his "Towards an architecture" by 1923: "L'architecture, c'est, avec des matières bruts, établir des rapports émouvantes", or, for Le Corbusier, the undisputed genius of 20th-century European architecture, "architecture, through the essentiality of the material used , is able to highlight strong expressive and emotional relationships». His way of doing architecture is completed and then realized by aggregation of elements that interpenetrate with different shapes, square, triangle, which, without a precise logic, form volumes of material consistency. In designing the city, he also took into account another fundamental aspect, the relationship with the surrounding natural landscape, linked above all to its visual use with respect to the heights of the architectures created. In fact, the plan provides for an almost natural slope of the houses as the territory reveals itself from above towards the valley below. The methodological approach of Aldo Loris Rossi towards the interpretation of the city is interesting, his architectural language, sinuous, but precise, clear, antithetical to the modern movement, especially with regard to that tendency towards standardization , to rationalism. His strong idea is clearly to show all the possibilities offered by construction, the use of new materials and imagination in particular, proposing a different architecture aimed at stimulating creativity. Starting from the assumption that men will be more and more creative, more ingenious and also capable of being protagonists of their future only if they frequent architectures that have particular characteristics, not standardized, capable of surprising and, at the same time, questioning. His architecture is like a "reservoir of the collective imagination" (cit.). A mixture of his architecture, vertebrate by dissonance. Like the avant-gardes for a long time considered, the project for him was change, prefiguration of the future; and so he organized and shaped the physical space. From Bisaccia to architecture books, from the “gentle” city for Francesco De Sanctis to the Casa del Portuale in Naples. Aldo Loris Rossi, an Italian architect, was first and foremost an Irpinia. Disappeared in June 2018, he was born in Bisaccia where he signed several buildings and neighborhoods, some remained unfinished. He was among the leading exponents of brutalist architecture first and then organic in Italy