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The essay discusses the research on the design of cultic architecture in the context of contemporary architectural culture in Sicily, starting from the experience of Pasquale Culotta and Crispino Valenziano. Their partnership intertwined between the speculative dimension of writing and theoretical reflections, and in the concrete experimentations of both designed and built architecture. From their experiences, it emerges the systematic treatment of a quality that goes beyond the areas of sacred architecture to refer to a deeper interpretative key of cultic architecture, a conception in general often neglected if not completely ignored. Indeed, their work gives light to the rigid reading of sacred architecture, to be understood as a building structure that is not qualified by sacredness, or by distance as remoteness of our Christian God, but rather by Holiness, therefore from the proximity in the distance of the Christian God. Through the discussion of important moments of conjunction between professional practice, as well as the establishment of a tradition in the discipline at the School of Architecture, and scientific research, it is possible to underline some specific characteristics such as the architecture of the place and the Mediterranean theme. These features motivate an even more important quality, reconnecting it to the universal experience of cultural architecture, namely the unit of space and time of the artifact as a spiritual expression, overlapping the nature of space ordered by the project.

The essay investigates one of the projects in the competition for the expansion of the North area of Palermo named ZEN 2 and designed by the architects Pasquale Culotta, Giuseppe Laudicina, Teresa Cannarozzo, Anna Maria Fundarò and Tilde Marra, in 1970. The essay aims at illustrating the spatial, figurative and urban qualities of it. The analysis of the project has been guided by a written text and the graphic support, that is the project report and the attached drawings, in Indian Ink, made by the architects themselves, indeed very often fragmented and difficult to be interpreted. In this regard, the support of digital drawing in two-dimensional and three-dimensional form, based on the creation of a Revit model, has been fundamental. That was the moment of the static and spatial structures, and it permitted inedited visual restitutions of the project, that would have never emerged otherwise, together with new interpretative keys. Moreover, it has been possible to offer the three-dimensional and planimetric overview of the spatial complexity of the project exploiting the photographs and drawings of that time as a starting point (for example the one by Franco Purini of the winning project). They show the existing project in its conceptual moment and in its real architectural artifact.DOI: https://doi.org/10.20365/disegnarecon.21.2018.8