HOUSING THE GODS

 Exploring history is analogous to design work.  You need to work at different levels.  Focus on detailed tasks, but also stay aware of the bigger picture, the social and cultural context, the technologies of the day.

Project Soane and Notre-Dame soaked up hours, days, months, years. Fantastic experiences, but we also need the view from 40 thousand feet. That’s where the massing families come in, and the collection files.  Stand back and look at 40 or 50 different religious buildings.  Group them in different ways.  Develop taxonomies like the relationships of fruit and vegetable from my 2012 studies. 

 

Temples and Churches are houses for Gods. Those gods are pinnacles of meaning. They sit on top of Hierarchies of value. They signal to us when we are straying from the path. I don’t believe in the god of my childhood. That is part of being modern. But when one God dies, another God is born in some dark corner of our brain chemistry. Because patterns of meaning require structure. We need rules of thumb, preferences, visceral reactions to potential danger. Embodied cognition. Russian dolls of metaphor.

So the Winter Wonderland competition came and went.  My church collection hasn’t progressed far enough to count as an entry, but I started to tie things together, to look at the bigger picture, to think about what it all means.  It’s great to belong to a community: “the church of BIM” perhaps.  Perhaps my role within that church is to emphasise the intuitive, artistic, right-hemisphere approach. 

My good friend Alfredo Medina sent me a copy of Sir Banister Fletcher’s wonderful “bible”.  That was a very moving gesture for me, unexpected but well timed.  Last week, my son shared a picture of his Fiancée in a Hampshire church.  There are so many of these small village churches within driving distance of their home, connections across time to deep traditions of daily life full of human emotion and meaning.

Let’s not lose that spirit in our fervour for all things technocratic.

 

 

The sequence of architectural styles first caught me attention as a schoolboy.  At first, I was absorbed by learning to recognize various styles and how they evolved over time.  Later on, I started to draw connections between those styles and the societies in which they emerged.  What was it about Italy towards the end of the medieval period that led to the transformation from Gothic pointed arches to the rebirth of classical style, the 5 orders, reverence for Greece and Rome?

How was it that the changes of fashion began to accelerate during the 19^th Century, leading to many different historical revivals existing in parallel, and attempts to completely novel styles for the modern age.  This was not unique to architecture of course.  Music, Painting, Literature also experienced similar fragmentations and searches for novelty.  Most people would agree that this is closely related to the ever-increasing pace of technological change and the social instabilities that this also engenders. 

Some years ago, I started to model Le Corbusier’s chapel at the top of a hill in Ronchamp.  This was clearly an attempt to reimagine the idea of a church without reference to styles of the past.  Is this true?  There are still towers, a Nave, confession boxes, coloured glass.  To what extent is this still a functioning religious focus to a community and to what extent has it become a tourist attraction, as so many older churches also have?

I want to ask these deeper questions in parallel with the more pragmatic, hands-on business of building models.