The science of religious architecture.

I’ll be honest, I’m out of my depth on this one.

But the whole point of this page is giving myself excuses to read and write about interesting things, so we’re forging on.

Church of the Light in Ibaraki, Japan (Tadao Ando)

How do we represent the divine on Earth? It’s an age-old question, and one that has been answered in countless ways. The Greeks and Romans sought to impress their pantheon by constructing feats of engineering, buildings of a scale befitting the gods.

Acropolis at Athens

The Catholic Church took a similar approach in the Gothic period by stretching what was materially possible at the time, building their cathedrals up into the heavens. The goal was for the structures to awe and inspire visitors into faith, and to this end they struck upon another pillar of religious architecture: Light. The intricate stained-glass windows and large open spaces created a sort of holy light in the cathedral at a time when many buildings were lit with dim candles.

Chartres Cathedral in Chartres, France

Moving into an era closer to our own, where we tend to spend our money on schools and Social Security rather than on places of worship, architects faced the challenge of capturing the essence of divinity without the crutch of throwing 200 years’ worth of the town’s taxes at it. In 1980, Fay Jones took the approach of connecting the church to creation itself by designing a chapel constructed of almost entirely glass in the setting of a forest. The effect of this is surreal—though the building is entirely contained and conditioned, you feel as though you are close enough to nature to reach out and touch it.

Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, AR (Fay Jones)

Part of what I find so interesting about the change over time in how we build places of worship is that it represents a tonal shift in how people see their relationship to their creator. The Greeks and Romans believed in harsh, demanding gods and so built monuments to their glory in the hopes that they would be spared the gods’ wrath. The Catholic Church in the “dark ages” worshipped a jealous and supremely authoritative god. Their only mission was to serve and to bring others into the faith, so they dedicated their lives to constructing awe-inspiring cathedrals in an attempt to move others to worship. Even in our own time, the tone has shifted again. The message presented by Fay Jones in Thorncrown Chapel seems to be that divine creation is all around you, you need only have the eyes to see it.

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