This article was originally published on Common Edge.
What makes something sacred? When does a building mean more to us than nearly all other places, spaces, objects, or activities in our lives? Architects strive to achieve the sacred in buildings, but it’s the rest of us who either sense it or not, whatever the aesthetics may be. I think the meaning of what is sacred to us can be most profoundly seen and felt when things change.
We build what we believe in. Developers believe in profit, and they build to service that ethic. Individuals want to manifest themselves or their family in a home, and those core desires get built. Governments are based on rules, laws and culture, and those essential values are reflected in municipal buildings.
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What Is Sacred Space?Throughout history, our beliefs made buildings, and we still feel this even when the buildings lose the intentions of their construction. A devotion to the belief in a life after death meant that the pyramids were built. The value of chronicling the sun was made manifest at Stonehenge. Our belief in God made religious buildings central to our culture. But values change.
A recent article in the Guardian describes the huge and ongoing shift away from what we once strived to build: sacred places, the churches, mosques, and synagogues where people gather to engage in the rituals of belief. The article cites the seminal Pew Research study that states the obvious: America is losing its religion. In 1972, well over 90% of Americans defined themselves as religious; now that number is 70%, and falling. “We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” write Jim Davis and Michael Graham, authors of The Great Dechurching. They cite that 40 million people who used to attend church at least once a month are now going less than once a year. Increasingly, most young people search for the sacred in nature rather than experience it in a building dedicated to organized religion.
For the first time in our history, America is closing more churches than opening new ones. In 2019, 3,000 new churches were created and 4,500 were closed. In the panic of change, it is easy to have a belief in our creations—buildings, traditions, institutions, religion—and despair over their loss. But change isn’t just loss. When we cease using a once vital factory building in New England, the cultural function of the building is lost at its closing. What motivated its construction has changed, but the reality of what was built remains.
The cultural change that is causing the abandonment of churches does not end the human search for the sacred. When they design, architects often want to go beyond the limits of what they can control, but there’s no formula or manual that turns the architectural into the holy. In trying to construct beauty, the designer can’t manipulate the perception of those experiencing a design as often as they might try, but in attempting to transcend our earthly values, that inability is uniquely frustrating.
Traditional rituals and theology are the programmatic equivalent of applied aesthetics—the theory and canon in architecture. In this century, the rituals of religion have become less relevant: there’s a parallel questioning of the style and aesthetic rules that have defined the ways we create architecture. In truth, what we feel to be sacred has nothing to do with theology or style.
At this cultural inflection point, it is not surprising that when the purposes of our buildings change, how we experience the world changes, and the way we perceive our buildings changes. The sacred in architecture is an essential reality within us that may have little to do with the history, rituals, and icons of organized religion, or how a building’s use changes.
An incredible testament to the power of beauty in architecture is the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul: its undeniably sacred power has survived through almost 1,500 years of changes. In 537 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantius II established that Hagia Sophia as an Eastern Orthodox Church that lasted for more than 900 years, until 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. The glorious building remained and a new regime transformed an existing place. The Hagia Sophia became a mosque, with minarets erected around the structure and new iconography applied to the interior, while maintaining much of the Christian art already integrated into its surfaces.
Nearly 500 years later, in 1934, the secular leader of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, desanctified the mosque and established the Hagia Sophia as a museum. For 86 years, the spiritual power of the space coexisted with its role as a historic site. Then, in 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared the Hagia Sophia Museum to be a mosque again, as the culture of Turkey reasserted a spiritual foundation.
Did the Hagia Sophia find, lose, or regain its sacredness by the redefinitions of its use? Does a sunset? The ocean? What is sacred in buildings, or in anything, has little to do with what we can control; it is in our perception. At the Hagia Sophia, the power of its space was facilitated by its exquisite structural engineering, but its spiritual impact could not be calculated, let alone prescribed. If we could control what moves us, all buildings would be beautiful in experience, and those focused on providing a spiritual haven and inspiration would have the ineffable power of Hagia Sophia.
The connection we feel to God can be triggered by any reality that we cannot control: a building, a poem, a piece of music, a sunrise. Humility in effort is not easy, and listening is harder than asserting, but the assumption of beauty via a canon, or style, or aesthetic, is just the vain attempt at design by formula.
Perhaps the most perfected brand in architecture was Frank Lloyd Wright. He could easily have claimed he controlled the outcome of what he designed, even defining beauty by his fully formed aesthetic. But even Wright knew that there was a power he did not define or control, but could be inspired by: “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”
What architects can do is listen. Especially when essential cultural evolution makes design critically important, uniquely true when creating sacred space is the focus of the creation. If architects can listen to what we feel, as Wright did, and get ourselves out of the way and discover the beauty that our minds and hands can reveal, the sacred becomes possible. But there’s no recipe; we do not make it, like a souffle. We find it.
