An utopia made true

Abstract

The diocese of Vicenza, at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, in close relation to social and ecclesiastical events, saw the utopia of an enlightened patronage designing together with architects two parish communities understood as a village come true. In biblical and liturgical rootedness, attentive listening and courageous response to the changes in the city, the faithful, guided by the authority of Fr Gianfranco Sacchiero at Villaggio del Sole (Vicenza) and Fr Nilo Rigotto at Villaggio Giardino (Arzignano), opened a fruitful dialogue with the Designers entrusted with the task of constructing not only a building of worship but a renewed, and in many ways unprecedented, experience of Church. The analysis of written documentary sources, architectural sources and testimonies will show the inadequacy of an authorial interpretative paradigm (awarding the merit of the architectural outcome to the architect/master alone) and the need to borrow concepts such as nascent state and charisma from the social sciences and psychology.