A most interesting issue. I am glad that Paul Harding raised it. Jim Williamson'd question is critical to address.
Stephen Pickard, too, takes a nice shot.
His point about the experience trumping the architecture evokes reminds me of how in the nineteenth century the experience in the camp meetings first of all trumped the settings until the enclosures started to be "designed" and made more permanent by eminent architects, some even emulating Robert Mills' First Baptist Church of Baltimore ( 1812) which was as classical as the Catholic Cathedral.
I am thinking of such as De Witt Talmadge's Tabernacle in Brooklyn (1891) or even Chicago's Moody Memorial Church of 1925. They are a far cry from Billy Sunday's great assembly in Syracuse or any of the great ad hoc tents that were impermanent. Functionally and architecturally between them sits the most neutral and beautiful of them all, J. W. Hoyt's Tabernacle at Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard (1879). The presence of absence is still palpable there.
The question raised by both Williamson and Pickard is one that hits at the heart of today's discussion about
which is more important in making a space sacred...the architecture or what goes on there?
It is the old 12thC discussion, I suppose, between Abbot Suger and St. Bernard, which re-emerged when
Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp appeared. Kidder Smith called the latter "the most important religious building of the past 500 years" Frederic Debuyst called it "the most dangerous building of the past five hundred years".
Romantic versus Rationalist? The House of God vs. the House of the People of God? And today...Living Stones vs Digital Dogma?
Lou Kahn had a different view of Ronchamp. But that is another story.
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Patrick J. Quinn FAIA
Institute Professor emeritus
School of architecture
RPI
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