We human beings are geographical beings transforming the earth and making it into a home, and that transformed world affects who we are. Our geographical nature shapes our world and ourselves. Being geographical is inescapable––we do not have to be conscious of it. Yet, realizing that we are geographical increases the effectiveness of our actions, the clarity of our awareness, and the inclusiveness and generosity of our moral concerns. It helps us see more clearly our world and our place in it.1
Robert David Sack, Homo Geographicus
In 2016, my undergraduate studio at UT San Antonio (UTSA) explored how architecture––mostly acting as the physical embodiment for religiosity itself––can provide answers to questions regarding the relationship between geography and worship. How has this relationship stimulated new forms of worship on a geographic scale? Can architecture be the lens for novel figurations of religion and how it has affected the aesthetic and discursive forms it has presumably taken?
With the historic and theoretical foundation developed by my (doctoral) research2, in the studio we utilized different mapping and drawing techniques to not only recover the relationships between worship, materiality, and representation, but unearth the mechanics behind the operations and how rituals, religious practice, and agency defined and redefined the metrics necessary in the design of novel figurations of worship in American history.
In America, Jean Baudrillard framed secularism and its relationship to the environment as part of his critical cultural observations in which he placed Europe against the United States into the same context. In his chapter, “Utopia Achieved,” he affirmed, “what in Europe had remained a critical and religious esotericism became transformed on the New Continent into a pragmatic exotericism.”3 His observations not only rendered religion as a sphere or representation of reality, but one in which the distance between the secular and the sacred, or as I would argue, its ontological trajectory, become less about the space itself but how visible and invisible systems eliminate divisions between the two. But rather than seeking the essential understanding of religion in singular objects we were interested in examining the amorphous placelessness, and how it registered in new spaces, new rituals, new aesthetics, and new understandings of how the sacred and the secular are intertwined, inseparable, and sometimes invisible to the apathetic eye.
Geographic
We considered the notion of “the geographic”4 as a framework because it externalizes the isolationism of religion as one that happens exclusively ‘inside’––or how traditional religious architecture separated ‘production’- and ‘consumer-culture’ into two distinct spheres. The geographic not only allows for a new understanding where religion might be located, but it also questions its spatiality, which on one hand, is about legibility, and on the other about cognizance. For instance, the geographies produced by the seventeenth and eighteenth century pastoral landscape not only shaped certain religious ideologies but also inspired the radical transformation from the cathedral to the meetinghouse. The role of camp meetings in the wilderness set the stage for revivalisms in urban environments, while industrialization, consumerism, and globalization all informed new religious typologies but also in return shaped and transformed the geography they were part of. As a result, it set the foundation for new rituals, new practices, new aesthetics, and new worship spaces that expanded the traditional figuration of churches into geographies, geographic objects, or both.
Figure 1: The Emergence of the Storefront Church. Figure 2: Geography of Online Churches. Figure 3: Geography of Online Churches Physical Attendance vs. Online Viewers
Elements and Aesthetics
Whether embedded in design traditions, intellectualization, or concerned with surrounding environmental conditions, materiality ascribed to cultural and ideological values and performative aspects in sacred architecture. Our drawings show how the examples of worship space we explored are transgressing the traditional understanding of materiality––or the overtly phenomenologization of it––by transcending the earthly and the divine with the profane. In Robert Schuller’s drive-in walk-in church, for example, the parking lot became the center space between the service on the inside of the building and the American cultural landscape defining the larger framework. Extended from the three-dimensional pulpit through the glass façade of the church into the windshields of the cars Schuller’s church completely reconceptualizes the relationship between religion and space, perception and representation, abstraction and reality, and the way the sacred is materialized, or as a matter of fact, dematerialized in architecture. Other examples also discuss material transformations and organizational frameworks. For example, 1810 Benjamin Latrobe’s camp revivalist meetings de-familiarized the seeker by completely obliterating any material boundaries between worship and the environment; Amy McPherson’s radio tower Angelus Temple expanded religion into unseen territory; Billy Graham’s The Man in the 5th Dimension pavilion at the New York World’s fair in 1964 radically dematerialized religion and worship into the moving images of a film; or in Richard Neutra’s Garden Grove drive-in church radio signals transmitted the church service into cars parked outside the church. These examples, and many others we studied, not only questioned the material presence of religious services, but also expanded how religion and the geographic reimagined material boundaries between the inside and outside, sacred and profane, mass (consumerism, media) and the needs of the individual; all ascribed to materiality as another form of spatiality, consumption, or even mobility, to not only render religion legible, knowable, and actionable but also offer new experiences.6
Representation and Rituals
The management of currencies and rituals also play a crucial role in setting the foundation for new metrics of religious spatiality. This is best understood through the characteristic adaptability that reverberated in a revolution of architectural forms, and a programmatic dexterity that radically redefined the roles of place, structure, spectator, interior, and exterior to create new forms of reality-architecture, or super reality. A space in which the exteriorization of the inside, as well as the interiorization of the outside, continuously extends its borders, “gobbling up everything and everywhere in order to increase (surplus) value and accumulate capital.”7 For example, the emphasis on physical characteristics such as accessibility and location was largely recognized. And churches, like businesses, needed to accommodate a steady flow of people, which required surplus parking. “With the development of shopping centers, Americans had become used to the convenience of easy parking. But a look at reality gave evidence that parking wasn’t always easy for churchgoers at ‘superchurches’.”8 Churches staged parking and utilized the automobile, or other means of transportation, as critical aspects of their religious practice. In fact, they were such an integral part of new religious philosophies of the 1950s and 1960s that they presented a direct analogy for the extension of religion into the geographic, connecting the larger cultural landscape with the collective and the self.
Agency
In conclusion, the studio did not exclusively focus on the accomplishments of the architect. But rather, we were interested in how the idea of architecture grows with the client, custodians, culture and the geography it is part of. For example, the participatory spectacle of church services was not only determined by the charisma of the presenter, but it also was a collaborative product in a causal relationship between individuals and a collective agency. Creativity emerged from the audience and the ambiance of the performance merged with the stage, which expanded beyond the spatial boundaries of the church and was mediated by traditional images, location, labels, language, and signs. As a result, it transcended everything that defines and makes architecture a source of architectural meaning, process, and probability, reclaiming new possibilities for physical manifestations for sacred or religious architecture in a secular world. It is about locating the geographic as the source of architectural meaning in the construction of relationships somewhere between spatiality and representation. With the research we have done we hope to challenge these positions in order to recast the ‘geographic church’ as an element of transcendence that not only helps us to perceive and draw the finest realities (and (im)-materiality’s), but inspires innovation and invention in an attempt to construct new meanings and aesthetics. These religious leaders, or what they propagate, have contributed to a better understanding of geography and architecture; they have influenced the cultural and environmental landscape as clients, if not custodians of God, and thus made tremendous contributions to the American landscape, and arguably, architectural discourses.
— Antonio Petrov
Endnotes:
1 Sack, Robert David. Homo Geographicus : A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
2 Part of my doctoral dissertation research at Harvard University. Petrov, Antonio. Superordinary! Aesthetic and Material Transformations of Megachurch Architecture in the United States. Cambridge, MA: My Doctoral Dissertation at Harvard University, 2011.
3 Baudrillard, Jean. America. London ; New York: Verso, 1988. pp. 81.
4 http://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?recid=365
5 Petrov, Antonio. “Superordinary: On the Problematique of the Ordinary “. MAS-Context Fall 2014, no. 23 (2014): 8-15.
6 Petrov, Antonio. Superordinary! Aesthetic and Material Transformations of Megachurch Architecture in the United States. Cambridge, MA: My Doctoral Dissertation at Harvard University, 2011.
7 Merrifield, Andy. The New Urban Question. London: Pluto Press, 2014. pp. 13.
8 Schuller, Robert Harold. Your Church Has Real Possibilities. Glendale, Calif.: G/L Regal Books, 1974.
Students who contributed with input and drawings to this article:
Abel Guajardo
Alejandro Luis Guerra
Annie Benavidez
Clara Barba
Cyrus Melendez
Daniel Ivan García
Diego Hernandez
Jesse Gonzalez
Laura Carolina Hernandez
Yoana Penelova
