Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-2000

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Architecture

Major

Architecture

Major Professor

Tracy Moir-McClean

Committee Members

J. William Reese

Abstract

This study is an inquiry into the elements of Form, Light, Path, Orientation and Place in spiritual architecture and the application of these principles in the design of a chapel.

The architecture of the church is to express in built form the connection between God (sometimes gods) and man. That's why spiritual architecture is called the "House of God." Although spiritual experience is intuitive and personal—no one can tell whether or not another person experiences the spiritual awareness intended by a spiritual place— spiritual architecture's purpose is to signal and facilitate this experience.

Throughout history, spiritual architecture has employed the elements of design in form and place, with which this study is concerned, in ways which have given this architecture universal recognition as spiritual places.

Path, Orientation and Place set spiritual architecture apart from the patterns or chaos of the ordinary—the profane, as Mircea Eliade identifies the commonplace. Light, in spiritual architecture, supports perception of a spiritual dimension. Since the development of spiritual architecture as places of assembly, light has been used to tell stories or to suggest other realities beyond the physical world, independent of its function as illumination.

Form in spiritual architecture is founded in shapes with perfect geometries which reflected the perfect symmetry and universal center of cosmological, social and political orders balanced on the belief in a universal authority.

This thesis explores these principles in the design of a Christian chapel.

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