The contemporary altar that I designed and built for the church of Santa Maria di Colle in the center of Perugia was part of the overall project for a redesign of the church's liturgical paths.

Architecture

The ingenious framework of the architecture conceived in the 60s by the architect Tutarini of Perugia is very effective in conveying a sense of imbalance, of dynamism that I still consider extremely contemporary and original even in the context of rationalist architecture widely practiced in that period. The lines of pillars and concrete vault define six portals that could be defined as pentagonal trapezoids. Their structure is perceived as an overall trapezoid whose upper side is broken, redefining a counterpoint direction with respect to the general inclination of each single "portal".

Re-meaning and symbol

However, the whole church as a whole required an intervention that would redefine directions and meaning. The altar was the first point of my intervention. By necessarily following a reverse path, given that the structure was already present, the effort was, and will be in all the interventions to follow, to think of an altar as the source of the church itself, its form its essence.

Raul Gabriel