church of solitude

Plans from the mid-1970s, by Gaetano Pesce, for a proposed cathedral "for the recovery of solitude". It would have been embedded in the bedrock of Manhattan.

Gaetano Pesce's Church of Solitude was conceived in reaction to his experience of New York in the 1970s, where he saw people living together, "helter-skelter in crowds." To provide a serene place for introspection and contemplation, he buried the church beneath a vacant lot amid the towers of the city. The silent sanctuary incorporated small individual cells, a further retreat from the city's corporate and institutional culture. An excavated landscape was, for Pesce, an overlooked space that could provide for people's future needs. [via]