Adjacent to the Hospital of San Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo in Italy, Traversi+Traversi and Aymeric Zublena design a church as a light white volume — a squared form surrounded by a curtain of thin white columns, essential and balanced between architecture and art.
The church was realised next to the Hospital of San Giovanni XXIII in Bergamo, designed by French architect Aymeric Zublena and Italian architects Pippo and Ferdinando Traversi — who also designed the hospital itself. The building is accessible both from the outside and from the interior of the hospital through an underground corridor, serving both the neighbourhood and those within the medical complex.
The architects chose to design a light white squared volume that defines the public square. It is surrounded by a curtain of thin white columns that filter the boundary between sacred interior and civic exterior. Both the outside and the interiors are essential — stripped to the relationship between structure, light, and surface, balanced between architectural rigour and artistic vision.
Inside, the space is held in a register of quiet intensity. The columns continue as a spatial rhythm that organises the nave without subdividing it. Light enters from above and between the structural elements, producing a luminous interior that shifts throughout the day. The palette is almost entirely white — walls, ceiling, columns — creating a volume that reads as carved from a single block of light rather than assembled from parts.
The church belongs to a lineage of sacral architecture that finds its power not in ornament or monumentality but in the precise calibration of proportion, material, and light. In a city whose historic centre is one of the most layered in northern Italy, Traversi+Traversi and Zublena offer a building that makes no attempt to compete with the past — instead proposing a spiritual space that is entirely of its own time.
