The architecture of the Conclave

No place is more alluring than the one you can’t see. In 2015, this might have been rephrased as: “...the one you can’t photograph.” But in the era of electing a successor to Pope Francis, it becomes: “...the one you can’t enter.”

The spaces of the Conclave are exactly that: they are all three things together, to be more precise. Normally open to visitors with a reservation, they become, for a few crucial days, more off-limits than the Berghain. No access, no cameras, no updates – aside from the famous white or black smoke rising from a rather makeshift chimney, especially when compared to the grandeur of the Apostolic Palaces beneath it.

From its inception, the Conclave has been shaped by architecture. Few other settings so clearly reveal how space can influence – even determine – political tensions that are later expressed through decisions, liturgies, and symbolic gestures. It’s the ultimate Henri Lefebvre.

The very origin of the Conclave is a matter of space: to lock the cardinals up (“cum clave”) in the papal palace in Viterbo, to open the hall and ration the food so that it would end quickly, was the solution imposed in 1270 by the citizens, desperate after three years of “sede vacante” that showed no sign of ending, amid endless negotiations and no decision. It must also be said that papal elections were almost uncontrollable at the time, with kings and emperors holding veto power over the process.

Today, under much more defined rules, the Sistine Chapel is the undisputed center of this process: to look at it with a minimum of critical distance, it has been a site of conflict since the beginning. The legendary ceiling frescoes were born from conflict between Michelangelo and Pope Julius II in the early 1500s. Later, in a posthumous censorship battle – a unidirectional conflict, with the original author as absent as he was irreversibly dead – artist Daniele da Volterra was ordered to paint over the nudes with modest coverings, earning him the nickname “Il Braghettone” (the Breeches Painter). 

Then comes the spiritual conflict that each Conclave vote brings to the place. During this time, the Sistine Chapel is sealed off. A raised platform separates the cardinals from the regular floor. Once the phrase “extra omnes” is pronounced, the doors close – “Maybe we can just get a wide shot of the Sistine?” asks a hopeful journalist in Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam, only to be politely and irrevocably turned away. The ballots are filled out inside and never leave, except as ashes from the chimney.

Another key space, though smaller and even more inaccessible, is the Pauline Chapel – the Pope’s private chapel, serving as an antechamber to the Conclave. Beneath 16th-century vaults by Antonio da Sangallo – and two additional Michelangelo frescoes painted in the short time left by Sistine projects – all the people involved in the process take their secrecy oaths before it all starts.

But perhaps the most crucial spaces are those in the “periphery”, those spaces orbiting around the core – the ones that remain less coded or formal, yet serve as vital arenas for exchange.

One such space is the Aula del Sinodo (Synod Hall), where the general congregations of cardinals are held before the Conclave – the time when negotiations intensify. This hall is part of the Paul VI Audience Hall complex, commissioned by Pope Paul VI in 1964 and designed by Pier Luigi Nervi to open the Vatican up to the mass media. Since its completion in 1971, papal audiences have taken place beneath its 41 reinforced-concrete arches and transparent parabolic roof.

There comes the Casa Santa Marta, the guest quarters where the Cardinals stay. A recent invention, by the way, that puts an end to centuries of far more punk solutions: until the Conclave that elected John Paul II in 1978, temporary dormitories were set up inside the Apostolic Palaces for the electors, certainly not designed to guarantee individual basic services such as a private bathroom. In comparison, Viterbo’s rough treatment almost seems preferable. The aesthetics of Santa Marta – to which Pope Bergoglio, who chose to live there, had accustomed the media – is itself an epitome of a certain way to religious dwelling, with its minimalism, made up of rooms with perhaps fine architecture, but furnished with a deliberately functional approach. A timely film, often cited in times of papal elections, namely Edward Berger's Conclave (2024), which was clearly filmed outside the actual council rooms, makes a rather radical choice to narrate this place: having chosen Adalberto Libera’s Palazzo dei Congressi in EUR district for some of the connecting scenes, it also corresponds to this aesthetic that of the Cardinal’s quarters, clad in an omnipresent stone that sets a singular visual continuity with the room where the Pope has just died.

And then, of course, there’s the city itself.

The red drapes, the balcony, St. Peter’s Square – but also the Rome of the Jubilee, transformed just in time to host an event which suddenly doubled its scale. The announcement of a new Pope will still be framed by Bernini’s colonnades and Fontana’s relocated obelisk, but now pilgrims must navigate Michele De Lucchi’s Jubilee hub and arrive from a newly redesigned Piazza Pia along the Via della Conciliazione. The surrounding Vatican Borghi (streets and neighbourhhods), recently reimagined for pedestrian use by studio IT’S, also play a role: in Conclave, Piazza Risorgimento is the setting for a peculiarly “spiritual” plot twist. But we’ll skip spoilers – and hope for manifestations of the spirit that are a little less material.

Opening image: Edward Berger, Conclave, 2024. To evoke the apostolic palaces, the Reggia di Caserta was chosen as the setting. © 2023 House Conclave Limited All rights reserved 

Conclave is available on demand on Sky Cinema and Now