San Paolo fuori la Mura St Pauls outside the Walls

Rome, Italy
Perhaps the most demanding question that can be asked of any architect is to invent a building to suit a new purpose, and the provision of an adequate, even seemly, answer is indeed an architectural feat. From the beginning of the fourth century a.d., congregational worship by large numbers of people needed a hall, and the Roman basilica a civil law court became one model for churches in western Europe. The early Christian architects ingeniously combined the vast, articulated open spaces of the basilica with the familiar layout of the Roman domus to produce a new architectural type: the basilican church. San Paolo fuori la Mura, begun soon after 314 and completed in the thirteenth century, although completely rebuilt after 1823, is the clearest example, simply because the others have been modernized