A New Church in the Rising Sun: Saint Francis Xavier

Among the wealth of buildings consecrated to the Shinto religion, Yamaguchi has a Christian place of worship: the Sanctuary of Saint Francis Xavier. The lot chosen is the same on which the previous church stood, symbol of the city and destroyed by a fire in 1991. Consonances and relations could be found with spaces that have wished to express with force the tension towards the Absolute not only in our Western world but also in the spaces of Oriental architecture, in particular Japanese, where the striving towards that spoliation and essentialness of things that is, a bottom, a thirst for truth is perceived. Finally, our effort had as its aim to make the architecture speak a universal language of the hearth of man, rapt to the infinite desire to experience beauty and to find himself once again within it to have an authentic experience of interior joy.