Transcending Architecture: Contemporary Views on Sacred Space

by Julio Bermudez (Editor), Randall Ott (Foreword), Bermudez Julio (Editor)

How should we construct sacred spaces, the places where we worship? Transcending Architecture considers the mysterious, profound, and real power of designed environments to address the spiritual dimension of our humanity. By incorporating perspectives from within and without architecture, the book oers a wide, critical, and nuanced understandin of the lived relationship between the built and the numinous worlds. Far from avoiding the charged issues of subjectivity, culture andintangibility, the book examines phenomenological, symbolic and designerly ways in which the holy gets fixed and experienced through buildings, landscapes, and urban forms, and not just in institutionally defined religious or sacred places.Acknowledging that no individual voice can exhaust the topic, Transcending Architecture brings together a stellar group of scholars and practitioners to share their insights: architect Juhani Pallasmaa and philosopher Karsten Harries, comparative religion scholar Lindsay Jones and architectural theoretician Karla Britton, sacred architecture researcher Thomas Barrie and theologian Kevin Seasoltz, landscape architect Rebecca Krinke and Faith & Form magazine editor Michael Crosbie, are among the illustrious contributors. The result is the most direct, clear, and subtle scholarly text solely focused on the transcendental dimension of architecture available. This book thus provides, on one hand, understanding, relief, and growth to an architectural discipline that usually avoids its ineffable dimension and, on the other hand, a necessary dose of detail and reality to fields such as theological aesthetics, material anthropology, or philosophical phenomenology that too often fall trapped into unproductive generalizations and over-intellectualizations.

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2015

About the author

Associate Professor Julio Bermudez directs the Cultural Studies and Sacred Space graduate concentration program. He holds a Master of Architecture and a Ph.D. in Education degrees from the University of Minnesota. He has been teaching architectural design, communication, and theory for nearly 30 years.

Reviews

[Ashton Ostrander · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bummer.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The mental task of architecture is to concretize our being in the world and to make us conscious of who we are. Instead of adding to the clatter and nervous speed of our lives, it has to create, safeguard, and maintain silence.'