To speak about sacred space from an Orthodox Christian perspective requires us to first think about how we perceive and understand reality. For many, knowledge of reality is not linked to an actual experience of someone or something. This becomes most acute in the realm of cyberspace and virtual reality where an artificially created environment[…..]
Section: Living Stones
The Boundaries of Our Habitation
How might we best articulate architecture’s legitimate ends? And what are its boundaries?Is this whole world not, after all, fundamentally a world of our own design? Do we not inhabit environments — built and imagined—that are increasingly shaped and controlled, for better or for worse, by our own actions?
The Vernacular in Church Architecture
The liturgy of the Early Christian era was about doing rather than saying. This distinction is borrowed from Dom Gregory Dix by Fr. Kyprian Kern, who was responsible for the first major Orthodox investigation of the sources and practices of the Christian ecclesia.The Jesuit scholar Marcel Jousse reinforces this assertion in writing of the early[…..]
The Rebirth of Saint Nicholas Church
Last year, I had the honor of being part of the blessing ceremony of the ground on which St. Nicholas National Shrine is currently being built. Very inspiring words were spoken during that ceremony, and it could be sensed that the foundations of this project are being formed of something more than just concrete and[…..]
The Future of Notre Dame
“We will rebuild it”: Even before the April 15, 2019 fire at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris had been extinguished, French President Emmanuel Macron had already defiantly promised to lead a major reconstruction project. But what rebuilding means is a complicated technical, artistic and political question.