Photo © Duccio Malagamba

A classic basilica it is not, but San Giacomo nonetheless evokes familiar church forms. Its roof—realized as a thin concrete shell after timber turned out to be too expensive—clearly recalls Gothic vaulting, especially since it is suspended above a clerestory that runs all along the top of the building’s undulating concrete walls (the roof floats on steel struts that are dissimulated among the clerestory’s glazing bars). Daylight consequently floods in from above in a way that is typical of church architecture, while the raw concrete of the building’s interior is plainly reminiscent of ecclesiastical buildings in stone. With no windows cut through its walls, San Giacomo encourages visitors to raise their heads toward heaven, especially at the main altar, which sits on a dais underneath a high central oculus. Looking up, they will see a giant wooden cross spanning the void, its arms made from old timbers rescued from Ferrara’s town hall, planted firmly into the concrete to become one with the architecture—where the classic basilica inscribes itself within a cross plan, San Giacomo embeds the cross into its very fabric. This is not the only reference to old Ferrara, the church’s exterior being clad in stripes of typical Ferraran brick and render (with the bricks, moreover, featuring a specially designed saw-tooth face intended to evoke the town’s 15th-century Palazzo dei Diamanti, famed for its facetted bossage).

Photo © Duccio Malagamba

The devil is in the details, they say, and EMBT has endeavored to chase him away by designing absolutely everything, from the high altar (a block of white stone from Trani, polished on top but otherwise left as hewn from the quarry) to the ambo, sedile, and other furnishings, carved from striped laminated wood. Those they didn’t design they chose, such as the 14th-century statue of the Virgin and Child or the artwork, commissioned from the artist Enzo Cucchi whom EMBT asked to join them in the competition—stone crosses, ceramic cabochon jewels, images in black ceramic like oozing basalt. Not quite complete (money has yet to be found for the EMBT-designed pews and confessionals), the resulting Gesamtkunstwerk is all the more remarkable given the low budget of $5 million.