Journal

Giovanni Michelucci (1960 – 1964)

“When I did the Motorway church, I got workers from various regions together, took them to the site where the stone was, and told them ‘this is the stone I want you to use – build me a wall one metre high’: and they tried to do just that, but one of them just couldn’t manage it, because he didn’t know the stone and was incapable of interpreting it. So he tried to smooth it; but what he did not know was that stone could be crushed by a hammer, giving the most incredibly-shaped smaller pieces. It was the wall itself, alive, that emerged”¹.
In the poetic words of Michelucci, the use of the material plays a decisive role, and the stone so often used by this architect from Pistoia, becomes of vital importance to the identification of architecture with a given place and society. The stone material immediately reveals its roots, and the encounter between the naturalness of rough stone and the creativity of Man points to a strong link between architecture and both the individual and the community as a whole.
The Florentine church, built to commemorate the workers who died building the motorway, saw Michelucci choosing local Tuscan stone, the building material of this central Italian region in which the sanctuary stands as a symbol of a country unified by its road network but often split in historical and vocational terms. The golden stone of San Giuliano di Pisa was employed to build the walls, the violet marble from Rosa del Campo to lay the floor in the large hall, and the white and cipollino marbles from the Apuan Alps to construct the altars.
The church appears as a large, tent-like structure for collective rites, a concrete drape covered with sheets of copper. The roof is a complex construction whose oblique thrust is transmitted to the ground by tree-like pilasters and load-bearing walls in reinforced stone. Thanks to an experimental method designed to increase the tensile strength of the walls, the sub-horizontal courses of the structure – made from limestone ashlars from Pisa are alternated with simple beds or larger reinforced concrete curbs. The external masonry facing is deliberately irregular, with generous mortar pointing and rough surfaces to the stone, which has been carefully “speckled” by the Tuscan and Emilian masons’ chisels.
The extraordinarily evocative, almost mystical nature of the liturgical areas, is once again characterised by the strength and presence of the materials employed. The roughness of the interior stone facing is countered by the rather different texture of the cement used on the ceilings and the pilasters. The rough chromatic neutrality of the reinforced concrete is enriched by the reddish-violet hues flecked with white of the perfectly smooth flooring composed of lead-jointed, concentric marble rings.

Davide Turrini

¹Mario Lupano, “Colloquio con Giovanni Michelucci”, Domus n. 720, 1990, pp.21-32.