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We still hope that the Pope will visit us
SIR – I was fortunate to get an early sighting of the Holy See’s first ever contribution to this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale and can strongly recommend it to Herald readers (Arts, June 1). In the lee of Palladio’s magnificent 16th-century church on the small Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Holy Mother Church commissioned 10 leading architects to design 10 small chapels. I’ll admit, however, that it was with fear and trembling that I boarded the vaporetto to cross the lagoon from St Mark’s, buoyed only by the vapours of umpteen spritz. How would the Church’s Great Commission be embraced by 2018’s taste-makers? How, even, would the wandering, sweaty mass of tourists respond to so much aggiornamento in this old place? Would it, God forbid, reduce me to spontaneous ejaculations of praise to the Almighty, despite the company of hip, agnostic friends? I needn’t have worried. From proto-caves to pomo adobe, from glam sheds to techno-Gothick, diversity was everywhere; everybody loved it, everything was nice and tidy. And nobody mentioned religion. Deo Gratias! Ambrose Gillick Lecturer, Glasgow School of Art SIR – I enjoyed Dr O’Donnell’s brisk review of the 10 exhibits in the Vatican’s contribution to the Venice Biennale, but rather than refer to the late 18th-century ornamental whimsy of Walpole, I would have turned to Rainer Senn’s 1955 chapel for the Companions of Emmaus (one of the Abbé Pierre’s communities of rag-pickers then near Nice). It was said to have been built by the architect and two assistants in three weeks, and have cost just £50. It was clearly an inspiration, as was Senn’s work in general, to that post-war need, or at least preference, to build transient “tents of meeting” rather than enduring temples. Paul D Walker Sheffield
