Like the places of worship of antiquity

Review

Peppe Occhipinti

In the spirit of exalting the primary elements—earth, air, water, and fire—the ancient oratory of the Most Holy Sacrament has been restored to public use. With a space reconfiguration project started last January, that bare and stark box that for decades served as the parish hall of the nearby Cathedral of San Lorenzo, hence named ‘Laurentina’, has been given new life. Before long abandonment due to the depopulation of the neighborhood and its conversion into a nightlife hub, it was used as a playroom for children, with ping-pong tables and a volleyball net, as a place where the Nativity scene was set up at Christmas, where Carnival parties and school plays for the little ones were organized.

Inside the 18th-century oratory, no traces remained. Not a decoration on the walls nor even the roof, removed for a subsequent elevation of two floors carried out in the 1950s. Only the façade, of an elegant neo-Gothic taste from the late 19th century, reminded passers-by of its original function as a place of worship.

One enters the oratory through a small side door, beyond which opens a narrow and long corridor marked by a succession of full-arched arches arranged like a Borrominian trompe-l’œil. The walls and floor, of an aquamarine hue, give the sensation of penetrating a liquid space that ends, on the back wall, with a small hidden oculus from which a light pours, reflected off the floor, evoking the moon over a river’s surface on a serene night.

From this corridor that optically gives an idea of depth, one accesses the large oratory room of classical configuration with dimensions proportionally related to each other, echoing, in plan, the dimensions of the stylobate of Temple E at Selinunte. That one decorated with the stunning metopes, including ‘Heracles against the amazon’, which are the pride of the Antonino Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum in Palermo.

The space is entirely played on the strength of the materials used, with colors ranging from ripe wheat yellow to a earthy coral pink to dark tree trunk brown. The recognizable stylistic mark is that of architect Antonino Cardillo, young but already laden with accolades, with works realized in Rome—the city where he studied classical architecture for nine years—Osaka, London, and Milan. His recurring themes are the cave and arches. House of Dust is the title of his iconic work built between 2012 and 2013 near Villa Borghese. And Specus Corallii is the title of his latest architectural work, proposed a year ago to Monsignor Gaspare Gruppuso and the Pastoral Council of the Parish of San Lorenzo, for the Sala Laurentina.

The evocative value of the word ‘specus’ is evident, which can be understood to mean cave, cavern, refuge. And rough as the vault of a cave, Cardillo wanted the ceiling of the renewed Oratory, made using a humble material whose use dates back to the construction of ancient Rome: pozzolana, whose name refers to its place of origin: the quarries near the Campanian city.

The roughness of pozzolana, used for millennia as a coating, cancels, with its chiaroscuro effects due to the particular technique of roughcast application, the separation of the joining angles between the roof and the walls, evoking the airy quality of a vault that the sacred place must have once possessed.

The pozzolana coating that descends from the ceiling to the walls stops on a base, high as a boiserie. It is mixed with an earthy color suggesting the pink of coral, fished from the sea in front of the city of Trapani and which for centuries here has been worked by skilled artisans who have created objects of sacred and secular use now exhibited in European museums, public and private collections.⁠^[1]

The floor is covered with large slabs of yellow-ochre calcarenite enclosing within them a fossilized branch of a young tree. By choice, they were placed flat so as to match the two halves of the trunk that the cut had divided, reassembling it in its unity. An appropriate polishing has made them reflective and the light that penetrates through the deep windows opened on the left side exposed to noon, creates on the surface a kind of mobile sundial.

From the same calcarenite quarry comes the stone for the base that coats all around the walls. Taken from the upper layers of the quarry, it has a less compact, more porous nature compared to that used for the floor and has not been polished. The effect is that of a soft fabric, a wrapping and insulating drape, capable of offering protection: cool in summer, warm in winter.

The motif of the tree trunk lying on the floor is echoed by the chestnut wood doors. There are five doors. Two to the west giving access to the control room and the staircase, two to the north towards the ‘Gallery of arches’, and a fifth—the double door of the entrance portal—opening onto the east-facing façade on Via Domenico Giglio. The ecclesiastical property oratory is thus oriented on an east-west axis, like the places of worship of antiquity.

Antonino Cardillo, Specus Corallii, Cathedral of Trapani, 2016. Photograph: Antonino Cardillo

Source

• Peppe Occhipinti, Lo Specus Corallii di Antonino Cardillo [email], Trapani, 24 Oct. 2016.