a+u 656: Sacred Spaces brings together landmark works of sacred architecture — from Jørn Utzon's Bagsværd Church to Glenn Murcutt's Cobar Sound Chapel — to examine how built form has been used to materialise the transcendent across cultures and eras.
About This Book
Part archive, part critical survey, this issue of a+u draws on the magazine's deep back catalogue to present some of the most consequential sacred spaces in modern architecture. The selection is deliberately broad: Geoffery Bawa's Seema Malaka and Lina Bo Bardi's Church of the Holy Spirit sit alongside Herzog & de Meuron's Motorway Chapel, each representing a distinct architectural response to the challenge of expressing sacredness. Rather than prescribing a single formal language for spiritual space, the issue maps the range of strategies architects have employed — material restraint, structural drama, landscape integration — to nurture what the editors describe as a relationship with a higher force. Essential reading for those working at the intersection of architecture and meaning.
Key Features
- 160 pages of architectural documentation, critical texts, and archival project photography
- Notable projects include: Jørn Utzon's Bagsværd Church, Seema Malaka by Geoffery Bawa, Lina Bo Bardi's Church of the Holy Spirit, Glenn Murcutt's Cobar Sound Chapel, and Motorway Chapel by Herzog & de Meuron
- Published by Shinkenchiku-sha
What You'll Discover
- How a lineage of modern architects — across vastly different cultural and climatic contexts — have approached the architectural expression of the sacred
- The tension between spatial innovation and liturgical tradition in works by Utzon, Bawa, and Bo Bardi
- How landscape and materiality function as vehicles for contemplation, particularly in Murcutt's Cobar Sound Chapel
- The way a seemingly singular building type — the place of worship — has generated radical formal diversity across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 160
- Dimensions: 220 x 290 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9784900213810
- Publisher: Shinkenchiku-sha
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and students exploring religious and contemplative typologies, researchers in phenomenology and sacred space, and practitioners interested in how landscape, materiality, and structure converge to produce meaning.