Mario Botta

There is a singular and persistent thread in Botta's career: sacred architecture. From the 1990s onward, he has designed over twenty churches and chapels, many of them becoming classic examples of contemporary religious architecture. Évry Cathedral (1992–1995, outside Paris) is Botta's most ambitious religious project: a truncated cylinder built of pale brick, ringed at the top by a crown of tilted trees. The cylinder's cut face opens toward the sky — a spatial declaration of "upwardness," drawing the believer's gaze from the ground toward the invisible infinite.

Santo Papa Giovanni XXIII Church (2004, in Seriate) demonstrates another key theme in Botta's sacred spaces: the drama of light. The building's east facade is completely sliced open by a single vertical slit; daylight pours through the fissure, casting moving spots of light on walls and floor. This is not decorative light — it is the protagonist of the space. At different times of day, different seasons of the year, this light enters at different angles and lengths, synchronizing the church's space with cosmic rhythms.

What makes Botta's sacred architecture distinctive is that he does not rely on any denomination-specific symbols. Saint Peter, the Madonna, the cross — these traditional images are replaced in his spaces by "geometry" itself. The circle represents completeness and eternity; the square, earth and order; the triangle, the Holy Trinity. Botta transforms religious emotion into spatial experience: when a person stands in a soaring cylindrical space with a shaft of light falling from above — no explanation is needed. The body's sensation is itself proof of faith.

There is one obsession in Botta's architecture: the wall. In his language, the wall is not the skin of space — the wall is space itself. A 50-centimeter-thick brick wall is not only structure but also thermal mass, a light modulator, the boundary between interior and exterior worlds, the interface for dialogue with the earth. Botta has quoted Louis Kahn's question — "What does the brick want to be?" — and answered it himself: "The brick wants to be a wall." This is not wordplay — it encapsulates the ethic of Botta's entire design life: letting materials become what they truly want to be.

This philosophy underwent an interesting evolution after the 1990s. His early work (including SFMOMA and Évry Cathedral) used brick as the primary material; brick's weight, color, and modular order constituted his visual identity. But after 2000, Botta increasingly deployed stone — gray and white granite, marble, limestone — and exposed concrete. The change in material has not altered the core spatial logic: symmetry, axis, centricity, and the light fissure. Materials are dialect, but the grammar remains unchanged.

Botta never stopped teaching and writing. He founded and chaired the architecture program at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland, transforming Ticino from a geographical concept into an intellectual center of architecture. He believes architectural education should not happen in an ivory tower far from the construction site but must maintain direct contact with building. This conviction is reflected in his own practice — though designing globally, his office has always stayed in Lugano, Ticino, never moving to Zurich or Geneva. Botta's career tells us: globalization does not mean rootlessness. On the contrary — the deeper you root in one place, the more irreproducible you become in the world.