Concilio Vaticano II e progetto urbano. Le chiese di San Raffaele Arcangelo e San Giovanni Evangelista a Palermo

To begin once again a moral and economic duty. Italy, after Second World War: according to Fanfani and Tupini’s laws (1949), INA-casa and its procuring enti- ties’ ventures made a motor of urban renewal from the enthusiasm and the commitment of many entrepreneurs and public administrators. In Palermo, the agricultural lands began to include new neighbourhoods designed as part of the reconstruction after the bombardment of the old city, which had to be restored. Soon big private capital had been involved also coming from «people until that time unrelated to building entre- preneurship» «many landowners located in the surroun- dings of the historic city sold the farthest part of it, applying a price of “agricultural land” in order to build public housing and infrastructure works. When the value of the crossed and not sold areas increased greatly , they began new speculation plans». Quickly, the new districts merged with the historic centre and with the continuous town of the nineteenth-twentieth century. In the fifties, between the town and its geographic limits (the mountains of the Corona dei Colli) a ring has been hypothesized. It was also useful to link the new residen- tial peripheral areas. In the sixties, the new roads marked a border beyond and around there were still a lot of citrus groves, vineyards, olive groves, flowers and gardens. In the fields, little rural buildings, warehouses and villas arose. The urban aggregations only were the thin clusters of historic villages. Among the new neighbourhoods there are the villaggio Santa Rosalia (1951) and the Centro di Edilizia Popolare CEP (1954), where the churches San Raffaele Arcangelo (1959) and San Giovanni Evangelista (1965) have been realized according with the design by Giuseppe Spatrisano (Palermo, 1899-1985). Spatrisano was Ernesto Basile’s student but also a teacher himself at University of Palermo. At that time, among others, he was a protagonist designer and intellectual within the urban transformation. Indeed, the aim to regulate the growth of the city results in the Town Plan started in 1956 by the same Spatrisano with Salvatore Caronia, Edoardo Caracciolo, Luigi Epifanio Pietro Villa and Vittorio Ziino. This plan underwent several drafts before being approved in 1962. Therefore, the churches San Raffaele Arcangelo and San Giovanni Evangelista are two pieces of a big transformation of the town. At the same time, these architectures show another innovation promulgated by the Church that was renewing itself during the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). For these reasons, both the architectures will be described, from a double perspective: from the outside, looking also at the city, and from the inside, considering the liturgical questions. It is interesting to understand how, in these specific cases, the outer and insider shells of the buildings, result from several external and internal conditions that interact each others in relationships of cause and effect, defining the surrounding spaces. The choice to compare these two churches comes from some analogies that help to clarify the salient issues on first: the urban design in the new neighbourhoods of Palermo; second: the Spatrisano’s interpretation of the indications by the Church about the design of new places of worship, that was, at that time, the focus of the archi- tectural debate. The similarities found are not really in the final architec- tural solution, rather in the process of the intermediate configurations. Both planning processes show a cultural change in progress about the relation between “church- context-conciliar reforms” and, therefore, they can help to know generally Italian churches built since the begin- ning of the sixties. Giuseppe Spatrisano often cultivated the interest, pre- sent in the Faculty of Architecture of Palermo, to the relationship between the architecture and its context. In 1948, he investigated this issue, for example, through the project of the Nautical Institute of Palermo, where existing and new paths would have to penetrate the buil- ding, shaping it. The school has been designed as urban hinge between three important areas of the city’s historic core: the Cala harbour, Corso Vittorio Emanuele and Via Butera. The outside is an intimate part of the archi- tecture. This happens also in his design for the Casa del Mutilato in Palermo (1935-1937) where, as Gianni Pirrone writes, Spatrisano «through a free interpretation of Hypaethros temple, centralizes and resolve the entire composition of the building in the cella-patio».6 This work, the best known by this author, is a manifesto of belonging to the Rationalism; it represents abandonment of the nineteenth-century language and of the traditional stylistic elements, from which, nevertheless, Spatrisano is always fascinated, as the historical and neorealist refe- rences of its last architectures show. In fact, in the years immediately following the war, he preferred rigid blocks, continuous curtains-wall and por- ches, agreed with his colleagues Bonafede, Gagliardo, Ziino for the Nautical Institute and with Epifanio, Santangelo and Ziino for the New Way of the Palermo Harbour (1949). But a few years later he applied slight distortions to the volumes, emphasizing the differences between the parties. In the sixties, his choice of a neorealist architectural language can be partly attributed to the tasks commissioned him in that period. The Nautical Institute or the Casa del Mutilato were silent and sometimes repetitive architectures that perfectly integrate within the complexity of the existing urban fabric. Instead, the new suburbs of Palermo, where Spatrisano is called to work, at that time arose in the countryside, out of the solid mass of the old town and out of the ordinate nineteenth century expansion.