Sacred Architecture: Between Art and Reality

Abstract

Analysis of tasks of designing contemporary sacred architecture in view of the author's own designing experience in the field encourages an attempt at a synthetic presentation of a number of problems. After 1970, obtaining planning permission for sacred objects was much easier than it had been before in Poland, e.g. in cases when the building area did not exceed 250 m2. Such a church was then called a 'chapel'. Another range covered buildings with an area not exceeding 600 m2. Designers often tried to circumvent those regulation by designing two-storey churches with the lower storey partly sunken into the ground. It seems that the legal regulations relating to the designed church area to some extent influenced also their form. Despite its large diversity of form, the church architecture of that time did not entirely free itself from the traditional patterns. The process of church construction involved an investor, a contractor and a designer. In many cases the construction was carried out according to a do-it-yourself method, and the architect was often surprised by changes made without his consent. The actual building created under such circumstances often significantly deviated from the design as he was excluded from the very process of construction. However, it should be emphasized that these problems occurred only in the implementation of some of the sacred buildings. However, many outstanding examples of religious architecture have also been built in Poland. Since 1989, a planning permission to build a church has not required special procedures to bypass the building code, and the designer now has a much greater influence on the ultimate outcome of his work. Therefore the majority of the problems discussed herein, characteristic of church architecture of the nineteen seventies and eighties, have already passed.