Churches: The Latest Architecture and News

Predominantly associated with places of worship, stained glass has been used by artisans across the globe for thousands of years in an array of art ventures and installations. Intensifying architecture with vivid color, the process of stained glass refers to a particular action in which glass has been colored via metallic oxides during its manufacture, using different additives in order to create a range of hues and tones.

In terms of architectural enhancement, stained glass is often pieced together in order to produce depictions of decorative art, allowing light to filter and penetrate a particular structure or building. As a component it is both decorative and a variety of window, allowing a substantial and sufficient amount of light into a space, for atmospheric and beneficial effect. 

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The historical Roman town has been busy at work and new exciting buildings, squares, and public parks have bloomed across the city. Since my first trip to Zürich in 2014, a lot has happened around good old Turicum.

After a compelling trip organized by Visit Zürich and my friend Philipp Heer, we were able to visit some of the newest, most interesting and uplifting places of the city. Flitting hither and thither, Roc Isern, David Basulto, and I enjoyed the privilege of a tailored itinerary, access to Zürich's gems, and perhaps the most inspiring, the architects behind these amazing structures.

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In the hilly landscape of Blumenau, a city located in the state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil, stands a gem of modern religious architecture by Gottfried Böhm, who recently passed away at the age of 101: the Mother Church of São Paulo Apóstolo, built from 1953 to 1963.

The São Paulo Apóstolo Church was built before the São Luiz Gonzaga Church in Brusque - two religious temples designed by Böhm with the office he inherited from his father, the architect Dominikus Böhm (1880-1955).

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Rich in symbolism and tradition, religious architecture has always been marked by the grandiosity and extravagance of its interior spaces. For the architects and designers who created these spaces, everything from the scale, to the materials, to the lighting were tools to be used in optimizing their form and function and creating a place for users to connect with their faith.

Between the late 1940s to the 1980s, Toronto, Canada, experienced a high rate of growth and development, resulting in a wealth of modernist-style buildings. Due to an increasing population, parishes were also outgrowing their spaces and found themselves in need of new facilities. Consequently, many well-designed modernist churches began to pop up throughout Toronto. This black and white photography series, titled Fifty/50 by Amanda Large, is an ode to these churches, and a celebration of their enduring importance to the city more than fifty years after their construction.

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We are in an unholy mess. It is a pandemic, with insane politics, and centuries of hideous racial injustice screaming out humanity’s worst realities.  Each day reveals more disease, more anger, more flaws in our culture than anyone could have anticipated.

This season’s inscrutable fears are uniquely human. The natural world flourishes amid our disasters. But architecture is uniquely human, too.  Architecture’s Prime Directive is to offer up safety. So in this time of danger, it is a good idea to think about the flip side of so much profane injustice and cruelty, Sacred Space? Architecture can go beyond playing it safe and aspire to evoke the best of us, making places that touch what can only be defined as Sacred.

What is Sacred Space? Whether human-made or springing from the natural world, Sacred Space connects us to a reality that transcends our fears. The ocean, the forest, the rising or setting sun may all define “Sacred”. But humans can make places that hold and extend the best in us beyond the world that inevitably threatens and saddens us. Architecture can create places where we feel part of a Sacred reality.

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The largest pilgrimage church in Sicily, The Sanctuary Basilica of Our Lady of Tears in Syracuse was built to commemorate the 1953 miraculous tearing of a plaster effigy representing the Virgin Mary. The ever-growing number of religious devotees prompted the construction of a dedicated church of an appropriate scale. In 1957, an architecture competition was organized for the design of the new church, where 100 architects from 17 countries participated. The winners were Michel Andrault and Piere Parat, and their sculptural design became not only a landmark for the region but a trailblazer for religious architecture at the time.

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Architecture can be understood through many prisms but is often seen solely as the response to material demands - housing, leisure, commerce, etc. But perhaps no space is more emotionally and symbolically loaded than that of sacred spaces. Designing spaces for worship (religious or otherwise) can be one of the most creative and liberating tasks of this profession. These spaces transcend the terrestrial plane of mere material to become part of a universe of subjectivity and faith.

We present below a series of illustrations of such spaces by André Chiote, featuring famed architectural works by designers such as Gottfried Bohm, Oscar Niemeyer, and Peter Zumthor. 

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Berlin is city in which the past and the present often collide – a phenomenon particularly acute when it comes to the built environment. In this project by Japanese architect and artist Riku Ikegaya, the interior of St. Elisabeth-Kirche (Church of St. Elizabeth)—designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel—is transformed by means of a structural installation. Consisting of a scale model of Schinkel’s plans for the Rosentaler Vorstadt Church, the artist has composed a "three-dimensional architectural sketch."

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If you’ve heard of Second Life, the 2000s-era web-based online world with millions of loyal “residents” who populated it with personal avatars, you’re likely to think it has become irrelevant or obsolete. But at the peak of its popularity, the site received a lot of attention for providing users with a potentially dangerous escape from reality—one so powerful that it was not unheard of to leave real jobs, friends, and families for those found within the site.

Second Life is the ultimate democratizer in space making. The vast web of locations in the site's virtual world, called sims, are almost completely user-generated. For as little as $75 a month, anyone with an internet connection and basic CAD skills can create, upload, and maintain whatever place they dream up. Sure, sometimes this “great equalizer” spits out such venues as SeDucTions and Sinners Burlesque, but more often than not, builders have responded to the complex opportunities and challenges presented by their unique situation with innovative design solutions.

One place to observe this is in the site’s many spiritual sims, in which religious architecture often responds to the displacement of religious authority in the digital world, since a lack of official (sanctioned) ties to tradition offers a designer more agency than in the real world. Read on to discover four cases that carve out a space for spirituality in Second Life and reveal some of what works—and doesn’t—in today's virtual sacred architecture.