City of God e-book

with Harry Burke

The book is a collaboration with poet and curator Harry Burke, bringing together poems and architectural drawings for a Monastery and Megachurch speculative project in Detroit, USA. Each drawing is like a poem, and each poem is like a space in which you can live. Each reading is like a confession. Together they build a city of belief, a City of God.

"Bava’s Jesuit monastery addresses the same “terrible beauty” of baroque masterpieces, and tries to adapt their pathos to the 21st century generic city. In this project, the corporate seriousness of Mies’s late work meets proto-punk rock band The Stooges. For Bava, the redemption of Detroit will not come from urban agriculture,but from the terrible beauty of the city’s desolation, once it will be confronted by the precision and rigor of architectural form.

I’ll be shakin’ I’ll be trembling’ I'll be happy, I’ll be weak."

Pier Vittorio Aureli


review on The Guardian by James Bridle

review on AQNB

buy on Google Books