Building Faith
Duo Dickinson
Having been an architect for almost 30 years, I have found there are a million reasons not to build anything. Beyond issues of money, Byzantine regulations, and the unending time dump required to plan, design, bid, construct, and inhabit any structure is so daunting that I find it nearly miraculous that anything ever gets built.
I see similar obstacles for many who are thinking about having a religious life in today’s culture. Why should anybody in early 21st century America actually take the time to attend a religious service? Unlike pre-TV times (let alone pre-internet times), churches are no longer the only show in town. For previous cultures cathedrals were simultaneously the rock concert, football game, art exhibit, and, oh yes, the source of eternal salvation.
Typically I design the “least rational” of building types – the single family home. Food, clothing, and shelter are the consensus “bottom line” for any human value system. But the quantity of effort and money needed to build a custom home is never justified in terms of any economic benefit to the family it houses. Despite its irrationality, there is an undeniable reason that about 500 families have asked me to be a thoroughly unnecessary part of their lives. Simply put, they have an unquenchable desire for the emotional affirmation only building a home can give them.
My take is that “shelter” is the largest “clothing” that we have as humans and that beyond keeping us warm and dry, our clothing serves as a radiant projection of our sense of what we value To me, this has a direct parallel with building churches. Nothing I know of in liturgy, Christ’s teachings, or canon law says that we should worship in anything more than a warehouse of sufficient size to accommodate those who want to be closer to God.
Clearly many churches are just that – rude boxes that protect the highly personal and sublime rituals and realizations of worship. Yet, places of worship are often intended to be art that stands in contrast to contemporary sensibilities, but they can also be designed as art that stands in concert with those aspects of our modern culture that have changed what religion is for many people.
Unlike historical or theoretical analyses of culture, religion, and aesthetics, my world as a practicing architect is dominated by building in the here and now. My reality-based perspective has produced several paradigms that give a contemporary context to historical and theoretical notions that often frame any discussion of religious architecture. Clearly any time one distills complicated realities, things get lost in the sauce, but unless some clarity is given to the hundreds of trivial factoids that tend to overwhelm any building product, nothing can be learned. Here are some thoughts:
1. Buildings do not make churches. Just as a house will not make a bad
marriage good or your children love you, the place of worship is secondary
to the health of the congregation.
2. Faith trumps money, but money demonstrates faith.
3. Personalities can poison the process. It’s only by keeping the “eyes on
the prize” of the ultimate purpose of church building that projects become
reality. When the effort becomes about the agendas of any individuals or
specific groups, then all is lost and great damage can be done.
4. There is never “enough” money, but there can be “too little” money, and
given the fact that churches are essentially unessential, doubt inevitably
creeps into the equation, and can only be overcome by acts of largely
unmerited faith.
Why should we build or renovate churches? If it is to reflect the personality of the congregation and its relationship to God, then there is no universally “correct” church architecture. Contemporary congregations worship in many distinct ways, and the goal of any given design is not only to reflect what already exists, but to allow the church’s mission to grow and evolve. Absent a link between the church building and its congregation, at best a church can be a temporarily attractive curiosity, and at worst it can be an ugly stop sign for those thinking about walking through its doors.
It is the existing congregation that creates an appealing public presence. This may mean traditional worship or contemporary pop-culture oriented services. Within this extreme range, buildings can either mirror a congregation’s methods of worship or it can counterpoint them. Either the architecture and the service mesh seamlessly or the service is in blissful ignorance of the building that houses it.
If success means “more meat in the seats” and failure is defined by dwindling participants in the act of worship, then probably the most successful architecture being built or renovated today are the Big Box churches of the South and West. But that’s a lot like saying the best homes are the biggest homes. In truth, as an architect my most successful designs for residences are often the smallest buildings we’ve build, and the larger buildings tend to have the least ability to be coherent, poignant, and ultimately useful.
In matters of faith, a building supports but it cannot sustain. Without faith, any church will soon empty out, and with faith the blandest buildings will be perfectly sufficient
