Summary Description Of Sant Ivo Alla Sapienza

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Summary Description

Sant’Ivo Alla Sapienza (Italian: Chiesa di Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza) is a Roman Catholic Church in Rome built in 1642-1660 by architect Francesco Borromini. It is considered the most innovative of architect Francesco Borromini’s churches. The church starts as a chapel of the University of Rome palace. Borromini was forces to adapt his design to the already existing palace.1 The church took more than 20 years to build, spanning the reign of three highly influential popes from noble families: Urban VIII Barberini, Innocent X Pamphilj and Alexander VII Chigi. Borromini incorporated symbols from all of their aristocratic coats of arms in the decorations: look out for Barberini bees, Pamphilij doves with olive branches in their beaks and the star and the jelly-mould from the Chigi shield.2

The Situated Work
Sant’Ivo Alla Sapienza is somewhat different from an urbanist’s point of view, because the institution, law school, filled the whole city block. La Sapienza was originally founded in 1303 by Pope Boniface VIII. The block was torn down and the new building constructed with a church dedicated to St. Yves (1253-1303), the patron saint of lawyers.
Borromini designed the building as if it were fitted into an older structure by using the institutional spaces as part of the “frame” for the church, which sits at the back of a long courtyard piazza, seemingly embedded within the fabric of the building.9
The church was designed in plan as two interesting triangles, with circles added at the perimeter to add or subtract space. The result is a space that is centralized and yet axial. Its simplicity is ingenious. The façade and the space of the church just barely intersect. In fact, the church has no actual f...

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...ation their arms are parabolic ribs and in plan, each arm or leaf with its two rotates twins, forms into a triangular shape. One set of these shapes having convex outer rims and the other concave. The two juxtaposed rotations seem to minimal the alternating petals and sepals you find in certain flowers – for example, the Columbine pictured in Figure 14. A similar flower, in which petals and sepals alternate as they spiral, belongs to the strawberry plant. The stamens and pistils in the center of either blossom would be the base of Borromini, his two type of leaves.25 it was commonplace in the age of the Baroque to model the interiors of coffered domes on plant symmetries. The spirals we see in sunflower and chrysanthemum capitula were particularly drawn on. But to Borromini’s petal pattern at Sant’Ivo Alla Sapienza is a more striking essay in botanical symmetry.26

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