Play of light and shadow: San Juan Bautista Church by Mario Botta

Mogno is a small Swiss village in the Maggia valley. In 1986 an avalanche destroyed the church and about a dozen uninhabited houses. In the 1990s the architect Mario Botta rebuilt the small church, dedicated to St. John the Baptist.

The innovative building made of alternating layers of marble controversy, but over time it has become a major source of controversy. reference point recognized far beyond Switzerland's borders.

San Juan Bautista Churchwith a capacity for about 15 people, has no windows. Inside, with the natural light coming in through the glass roof and its stripped-down simplicity, you can feel a very strong spiritual presence.

The church consists of a rectangle inscribed in an outer ellipse that gradually deforms into a circle at the height of the roof, inclined in the direction of the short axis of the ellipse.

"There is no aesthetics without ethics, there is no immoral aesthetics," says Mario Botta, one of the most original voices in the architecture of our time. This Italian architect considers architecture as an almost spiritual duty. Like a Baroque architect, he once said, "Building is a sacred act, an action that transforms a condition of nature into a state of culture."