Dogma

Sacellum

The project is an interpretation of the Sacellum type. Sacella were shrines built by the ancient Romans for religious cults. Their form was often round or cubic, and their dimensions were small. Sacella were not temples but small enclosures for offerings and private worship. In Chris- tian times, they became small chapels or aedicula built as appendices of larger churches or inde- pendently as small monuments. In premodern cities, their presence was ubiquitous, both inside of buildings or on the outside of the urban landscapes. Notable examples are the Sacellum of the Holy Sepulcher in Florence, designed by Leo Battista Alberti and the ancient Sacellum of San Satiro in Milan, restored and encased by Donato Bramante. Our project is non-denominational Sacellum. It can be used for private worship or meditation. It can be built anywhere, indoors or outdoors. Sacellum is both an homage to and inspired by the work of Simon Ungers (1957–2006). Through almost all his mature career, Ungers worked on projects without client and site. Illustrated in a handful of small and often self-published booklets, Ungers’s projects refer to public programs such as museums, libraries, theaters, cathedrals, etc. We were particularly inspired by his pro- posals for sacred buildings contained in the book Sieben Sakrale Räume (2003). These projects are at one time strange and familiar, explicit in their monumentality and enigmatic in their form. They don’t seem to adhere to the liturgies or cults they are supposed to contain. They seem to be more about forgetting than memorializing. Ungers wrote about his architectural objects that “do not try to be imaginative in form and make no claim to be original. Rather, they are an attempt to reinterpret ideas, to give shape to an idea, to lend form to an idea of something.”