Sacred Architecture Timeline

(Multiple Architectures)

Partner - Gabriel Blake

Different people can synthesize a specific place as serene or spiritual, whether or not it yields a religious connotation. Many individuals who visit these places, however, cannot articulate how the environment is performing. They are only aware of its harmonizing nature with human senses, and how it silences them. Vincent Scully compares works of architecture that polarize on the historical timeline of precedented architecture. The sacred timeline illustrated on the beside page categorizes the architectural characteristics of a space that evokes silence or spirituality. Overlayed in a bee trail is the chronological timeline that connects with the new timeline network.1

The timeline begins at Stonehenge and ends at the Myyrmaki Church in Finland. Additional arrows cast how our phenomenological strategies cannot be categorized according to era. The timeline beings with the depiction of an arrival; viewing the personified architecture from the afar view planned for the user; the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, and the East Rock Outcropping in New Haven, CT. The network descends into architecture that interacts with the Earth and the sky. Architecture can both juxtapose and complement the landscape. Light has always been an entangling feature in architecture that aids in defining space and spacial qualities. The light and the sky have been what have motivated civilizations to build up from the ground and reach the sky; the empire state building in new york city and Temple 1 in Tikal, though predating the skyscraper by 1200 years, both aid the fulfillment of extending our beings towards the sky and the cosmos. Scully capitalizes on this phenomenon because it symbolizes the human perception of divinity and unity for architecture built toward the cosmos.

The Pantheon of Rome serves an architecture that serves many phenomenological qualities of architecture; geometry, light as substance, threshold, and celestial connection. More details regarding its phenomenological ties to the characteristics of spiritual architecture have been laid out in my first analytical sketch. The way humans used to conceive architecture was through the landscape, and how it connects to the body. Now, we find phenomenological qualities of space articulated by light in both ancient and present secular architecture.

Different people can synthesize a specific place as serene or spiritual, whether or not it yields a religious connotation. Many individuals who visit these places, however, cannot articulate how the environment is performing. They are only aware of its harmonizing nature with human senses, and how it silences them. Instead, we might find it much easier to distinguish spaces we are repelled by and nominate characteristics that produce spiritual space. A typology chart that simmers-down

Medium: Vellum, led pencil, Tombow ABT Watercolor Pen, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, & InDesign the spacial ornamentation of every historic piece of architecture can help designers figure out what qualities make it transcend into the present. The typological form of the interior space created by the architecture can be distilled into trapezoids for the Parthenon, triangles for central-American and Egyptian pyramids, a circle for the Pantheon, and so on. Secular architecture can be analyzed through very different avenues, such as the impact of light, stereotomic material, or geographical orientation; their graphic successfully synthesizes the relationship between an articulated space and the human body.

Stonehenge, UK; Temple of Apollo, Athens, Greece; Unity Temple, IL; East Rock Outcropping, Connecticut; The Acropolis, Athens, Greece; Temple 1, Tikal, Guatemala; Empire State Building, NYC, USA; Abbey Church of St. Marie-Madeline, Vezelay, France; Pantheon, Rome; Notre Dame Du Haut, Ronchamp, France; Myyrmaki Church, Finland; MIT Chapel, Cambridge, MA, USA

Sacred architecture timeline