Susan Klaiber (Ph.D., FAAR) is an architectural historian based in Winterthur, Switzerland, whose work focuses on Baroque architecture in Italy, France, and Germany. Her publications include the book Guarino Guarini (Umberto Allemandi & C.), co-edited with G. Dardanello and H. A. Millon. She serves on the governing committee of the European Architectural History Network, and was founding editor of the Network’s EAHN Newsletter (2007-2010). Website: www.susanklaiber.wordpress.com.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the birth of the baroque priest-architect Guarino Guarini (1624-1683). Guarini, a Theatine priest active as a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, as well as an architect, designed buildings throughout the Italian peninsula and across Europe.
Disjunctions between contemporary Catholic architecture and the liturgical and representational needs of the Church often reflect conflict between the client’s sacred concerns and architecture’s secular culture, or divergence between the architectural needs of other denominations and those specific to Catholicism. But historically this was not always the case.