CURRENT RESEARCH

Modern Sacred Architecture

Sacred buildings have accounted for many of the most technically and artistically innovative works of architecture ever created. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, traditional ways of building churches and other religious structures have lost their organic relationship to society, and formal religious affiliation has declined in the West. Yet it would be wrong to imagine that modern architects had no interested in the sacred. The quest for spirituality and transcendence was a powerful provocation to influential designers like Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

In today’s “post-secular” age, the category of sacred architecture is both important and contested. I am interested in how modern architecture reflects both the forces of secularization and the persistent search for the sacred. Much of my work engages with Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the most liturgically rich Christian traditions.

In summer 2023, I co-convened a symposium on modern sacred architecture at Fordham University. As part of this event, I held a public conversation with Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Justin Davidson at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine, located at the World Trade Center and designed by Santiago Calatrava. Some of my published writing on related subjects:

The Electronic Campanile at Ronchamp
• Le Corbusier’s little-known proposal for an electrified “bell tower” at his Ronchamp chapel

Echoes of Byzantium: Review of Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia
• On contemporary efforts to measure and simulate the acoustics of the famous cathedral

Peeling Back the Onion Dome: Review of Theology and Form 
• Surveying contemporary Eastern Orthodox church architecture in America