The Church building secularization through its sound in a contemporary case study

This work describes a novel approach in designing new churches, explaining the case study Sant'Ambrogio Church in Trezzano, Milan (IT) in detail. The article presents a room acoustics analysis of the church through implementation of computer simulation techniques, emphasizing the continuity and breaking elements with historical churches. In the past the sacred sense in a church was greatly reinforced by the surrounding atmosphere of very reverberant spaces with possible echoes that infatuated the perception of God and his presence. On the contrary, nowadays concentration and intimacy are preferred, the reverberation is reduced, the speech intelligibility of the homily to understand the message of God is increased, while music or songs steel accompany the choral word of the church goers. The proposed acoustic design includes a new approach with an acoustic response suitable for both speech and music, considering also the recent room acoustics studies in other typologies of building such as congress centers and multipurpose auditoria.