From the Hut to the Totem: An Archetypal Analysis of the Holy See's Eleven Chapels at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Abstract

At the 2018 Venice Biennale, the Holy See participated with eleven chapels in the woods designed by eleven teams of notable architects from all over the world, allowing us to monitor the global vision of worship spaces today. In this essay, we analyse the architectural reflections of the different invited architects in the light of the two main archetypes of architecture: the primitive hut and the totem pole. The great difference between the two archetypes is in the subjective temporality of space. In the hut archetype, temporality takes us back to the beginnings of architecture, and within this group we have divided the chapels into two subgroups: those belonging to the inward hut archetype, which delimits an interior space isolated from the environment, and those that follow the outward hut archetype, which delimits an interior space that establishes a direct relationship with the exterior. The chapels that follow the totem archetype, on the other hand, have the characteristic of renouncing the delimitation of their own spatiality and, through the insertion of an element, are able to generate a field of imprecise boundaries and transform a portion of the environment into a place of prayer and meditation.