Architecture and Liturgical Space
Daniel Lee | March 13-17, 2017
Registration deadline: February 5, 2016.
Course Description
Our secular culture and the church both engage in liturgical practices – rituals of ultimate concerns. These practices shape our loves, form our identities, and seek to displace other interests. Their liturgies are often opposed, as they propose different visions of “the good.” While advanced western culture uses every means to instill a desacralized vision, many churches have abandoned liturgical practices and resist cultural engagement.
Architecture serves a liturgical role. As embodied creatures we need more than shelter, we need architecture. A work of architecture is a carefully designed liturgical environment, supporting our civic, work, family, play and worship life. It conveys, through spatial form and ordering, and various aesthetic and symbolic languages, who we are: our dignity or meaninglessness, our abandonment or legitimate sense of place in the cosmos, our status as faceless atomized individuals or as members of a connected loving community, and the nature and purpose of our civic life, work, politics and worship, as we live with each other, in Beauty or darkness before the Trinity.
In this course, Daniel Lee begins by exploring the nature of architecture and how the liturgies of both secular culture and the church have worked, past and present. Within this context he then focuses in on liturgical practices for the church today and in the future. He completes the course by presenting a process that church leaders may use for pre- planning significant new places of worship today. The course content is illustrated, and includes selected outside readings.
About the Instructor
Daniel lee is an architect, with his own professional private practice in Alexandria, Virginia, where he also serves as an elder at Alexandria Presbyterian Church, PCA. The son of Protestant missionaries, he spent his childhood in Paris, France, where his love for architecture was first cultivated. Following graduation from the Mississippi School of Architecture, in 1981, he studied with noted classicist Alan Greenberg, and with leading design theorists such as Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander, HRH the Prince of Wales, and others. He has contributed to numerous civic, commercial, and residential architecture projects throughout his career.