During the conference, Ricardo Gómez Val discussed the proposals on religious architecture that developed over an entire decade Grup R, a group of Catalan architects born in 1951 in Barcelona that was the catalyst in the recovery of modernity in Catalan architecture and aesthetics during the Spanish postwar period.

The innovation of his research is based on the analysis of several projects on sacred spaces as a driving force of architectural development. Gómez Val has analysed the different emergency churches designed by this group of architects during the fifties and sixties in the newly created neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Barcelona. These new solutions were inspired, among others, by the French influence of the magazine L’Art Sacré. The use of large light-filled structures shows the new expressive language with which these spaces were designed from that time on.

Ricardo Gómez Val has been a lecturer at UIC Barcelona since 2018, and did his doctoral thesis on the sacred heritage in Barcelona during the second half of the 20th century.

Foto: Unplash / Michal Matlon. Sainte Marie de la Tourette (Le Corbusier)