Many recently built churches are ugly as sin. Others are great as design but don’t work well functionally or symbolically. Most are just boring. How it can be that, having been the avant garde of design and engineering for almost two thousand years, church design today has so failed? A major cause is the lack of productive dialogue between the client and the architect due to mutual ignorance of each other’s culture and values. This course intends to address that gap from the architect’s side, giving you, the architect, a greater voice in the decision process. Accordingly, in this course church design is approached primarily (but not exclusively) from the client/user point of view: understanding the assumptions, expectations, and requirements of your client will enable you to either meet these or offer well-informed arguments against them. The course also furnishes you with a dossier of written and visual materials relevant for professional practice in this area today. Lectures cover cultural, historical, theological, and aesthetic aspects of church design. While many of our examples will be either modern or contemporary structures, the course includes churches from every period of West European Christian history furnishing you with alternative models for how particular design problems may be resolved. These are not intended as paradigms to be repeated, but rather as seeds for new ideas. This course responds to the current crisis in church design by equipping participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to address it and to propose fresh, better, solutions; not only competence, but creative innovation are desired outcomes.

The course begins by examining the current controversies and competing theories about the nature and purpose of sacred space, preparing participants for the issues inherent in this kind of commission. We then consider function in relation to liturgy with particular attention to the new requirements of Vatican II (1962-1965, but only fully implemented in 2000), placing these within a broader historical context of historical patterns of use in church buildings. Next comes a deep reading of the symbolic and metaphorical meanings of churches and how these ideas may be translated into material form. The last part of the course is a sustained consideration of beauty, first as philosophical and theological ideas and then as applied to as proportion, light, color, and function. We end with two lectures on wonder — what it is and how to produce it.  

In this course, Christianity is considered as culture, not as creed.

Note regarding the Fall 2025 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Tuesday, September 9th.