Architecture of the World’s Major Religions


Book Description

In Architecture of the World’s Major Religions: An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities, Thomas Barrie presents religious architecture as an amalgam of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements, which are often materialized in different ways in the world’s principal religions.




Architecture of the World's Major Religions


Book Description

In 'Architecture of the World's Major Religions: An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities', Thomas Barrie presents and explains religious architecture in ways that challenge predominant presumptions regarding its aesthetic, formal, spatial, and scenographic elements. Two positions frame its narrative: religious architecture is an amalgam of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements; and these elements are materialized in often very different ways in the world's principal religions. Central to the work's theoretical approaches is the communicative and discursive agency of religious architecture, and the multisensory and ritual spaces it provides to create and deliver content. Subsequently, mythical and scriptural foundations, and symbols of ecclesiastical and political power are of equal interest to formal organizations of thresholds, paths, courts, and centers, and celestial and geometric alignments. Moreover, it is equally concerned with the aesthetic, visual and material cultures and the transcendent realms they were designed to evoke, as it is with the kinesthetic, the dynamic and multisensory experience of place and the tangible experiences of the body's interactions with architecture.




Art and Architecture of the World's Religions [2 volumes]


Book Description

Two abundantly illustrated volumes offer a vibrant discussion of how the divine is and has been represented in art and architecture the world over. Beginning with the ancient worlds of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome and moving forward through time, Art and Architecture of the World's Religions explores the major faiths from countries and continents around the globe, helping readers better understand the creations their beliefs have inspired. After tracing the history and development of a religion, the book provides a general overview of its principal beliefs and key practices. It then offers specific examples of how works of art/architecture reflect that religion's values. The focus of each chapter is on the temples, churches, and religious buildings, statues, paintings, and other works of art and architecture created by believers. Each representative work of art or architecture is examined in terms of its history, materials, symbols, colors, and patterns, as its significance is explained to the reader. With extensive illustrations, these volumes are the definitive reference work on art and architecture of the world's religions.




Art and Architecture of the World's Religions


Book Description

Two abundantly illustrated volumes offer a vibrant discussion of how the divine is and has been represented in art and architecture the world over. Beginning with the ancient worlds of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome and moving forward through time, Art and Architecture of the World's Religions explores the major faiths from countries and continents around the globe, helping readers better understand the creations their beliefs have inspired. After tracing the history and development of a religion, the book provides a general overview of its principal beliefs and key practices. It then offers specific examples of how works of art/architecture reflect that religion's values. The focus of each chapter is on the temples, churches, and religious buildings, statues, paintings, and other works of art and architecture created by believers. Each representative work of art or architecture is examined in terms of its history, materials, symbols, colors, and patterns, as its significance is explained to the reader. With extensive illustrations, these volumes are the definitive reference work on art and architecture of the world's religions. 200 illustrations, including floor plans of churches, synagogues, and temples bring the discussions of art and architecture to life An extensive bibliography enables further research




Art and Architecture of the World's Religions


Book Description

Two abundantly illustrated volumes offer a vibrant discussion of how the divine is and has been represented in art and architecture the world over. Beginning with the ancient worlds of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome and moving forward through time, Art and Architecture of the World's Religions explores the major faiths from countries and continents around the globe, helping readers better understand the creations their beliefs have inspired. After tracing the history and development of a religion, the book provides a general overview of its principal beliefs and key practices. It then offers specific examples of how works of art/architecture reflect that religion's values. The focus of each chapter is on the temples, churches, and religious buildings, statues, paintings, and other works of art and architecture created by believers. Each representative work of art or architecture is examined in terms of its history, materials, symbols, colors, and patterns, as its significance is explained to the reader. With extensive illustrations, these volumes are the definitive reference work on art and architecture of the world's religions. 200 illustrations, including floor plans of churches, synagogues, and temples bring the discussions of art and architecture to life An extensive bibliography enables further research







Prayers in Stone


Book Description

The classical revival style of architecture made famous by the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago left its mark on one of the most sustained classical building movements in American architectural history: the Christian Science church building movement. By 1920 every major American city and many smaller towns contained an example of this architecture, financed by the followers of Mary Baker Eddy, the church's founder. These buildings represented a new, burgeoning American institution that appealed to business people and to young men and women working to succeed. Characterized by middle-class congregations that in the early part of the century were over 75 percent women, Christian Science suggested radical civic reform solutions based on an idealistic and pragmatic individualism. It attracted criticism from traditional churches and from the medical establishment due to its rapid growth and to its reinstatement of primitive Christianity's lost elements of physical healing and moral regeneration. Prayers in Stone spins out the close connections between Christian Science church architecture and its social context. This architecture served as a focal point for debates over the possibilities for a new twentieth-century urban architecture that proponents believed would positively shape the behavior of citizens. Thus these buildings played a critical role in discussions concerning religious and secular architecture as major elements of religious and social reform. Drawing on a wide range of documentary evidence, including material from the archives of the Mother Church in Boston, Paul Ivey uses Christian Science architecture to explore the social implications of architecturalstyles and new building technologies, to illuminate class-based notions of civic reform and beautification, and to investigate the use of architecture to bring about religious and social change. In addition, the book explores complex gender issues, including early attempts to define a professional space for women as Christian Science practitioners. Lavishly illustrated, Prayers in Stone focuses on four major city arenas of Christian Science building -- Boston, Chicago, New York, and the San Francisco Bay area -- to demonstrate the vital intersection of architecture and religion at the so-called margins of American society.




Sacred Spaces


Book Description

A great deal has been written about religious architecture in ancient cultures, but the great bulk of the literature has tended to be culture-specific. Wightman's volume offers for the first time a comprehensive synopsis of the rich manifestations of religious architecture throughout the ancient world. In addition, the book provides a conceptual framework within which cross-cultural comparisons of religious architecture may usefully take place, and tackles some fundamental issues in relation to the definition and characterisation of sacred space in ancient contexts. The last fifteen years have witnessed the focusing of a great deal of scholarly attention on the archaeology of religions, with the result that today researchers are able to make use of a broad armoury of theoretical and methodological approaches. Yet theory must at all times be tested against material evidence, and here Wightman's volume is timely in laying out empirical data pertaining to all the major traditions of religious architecture in antiquity. The book is comprised of twenty-one chapters divided into five parts. Beginning around twelve thousand years ago at the transition of the Holocene, the book embarks on an explorative journey around the ancient globe, ending between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD. The first four parts of the book deal with broad regions of the ancient world: Western; Pre-Classical Europe and the Mediterranean; the Graeco-Roman world; South and East Asia; and the Americas. Part Five, covering about a quarter of the book, has three chapters, each dealing with aspects of sacred space (Identity and Meaning, Language of Sacred Space, Text and Image). The text is complemented by approximately 400 line drawings in colour - many of which are Wightman's reconstructions of ancient temples and sanctuaries - and 200 photographic plates, most in colour. The volume is rounded off by a comprehensive bibliography with essential literature highlighted, benefiting both the general reader and specialists. Wightman's book will become a work of reference to those interested in gaining or furthering an understanding of architecture, archaeology and religion in the ancient world.




The Religious Architecture of Islam


Book Description

The Religious Architecture of Islam is a wide-ranging multi-author study of the architectural traditions associated with the religion of Islam across the globe. A total of 59 essays by 48 authors are presented across two volumes, Volume 1: Asia and Australia and Volume 2: Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Essays address major themes across historical and contemporary periods of Islam and provide more focused studies of developments unique to specific regions and historical periods. The essays cover Islamic religious architecture broadly defined, including mosques, madrasas, saints' shrines, and funerary architecture. The Religious Architecture of Islam both provides an introduction to the history of Islamic architecture and reflects the most recent scholarship within the field.




Houses of God


Book Description

The subject of architecture for religion continues to fascinate. 'Houses of God: Religious Architecture for a New Millennium' by noted author and architect Michael J. Crosbie, demonstrates an inspiring array of gathering places for worship, collected from the USA and abroad. These projects, illustrated with superb photography and detailed plans, demonstrate how architects and congregations can work together to build places that satisfy often complex cultural and personal needs. There are churches, synagogues and temples by some of the world's leading architects, including Tadao Ando Architect and Associates, Heinz Tesar, Gould Evans and many others. AUTHOR: Michael J. Crosbie is an architect, author, journalist and teacher. He is the author of numerous books on architecture and has written for a number of journals and magazines. He is currently the assistant editor at 'Faith andamp; Form', teaches architecture at Roger Williams University and has lectured at architecture schools in North America and abroad. SELLING POINTS: - Third title in IMAGES' sell-out religious architecture series that has a captive and loyal returning audience around the world. New layout and design. - Superb colour photography captures the latest designs and renovations for over fifty churches, synagogues, temples and inter-faith centres, each drawing either from age-old tradition, or daring to chart new waters for religious expression. - Features project descriptions and many plans. - Authored by renowned author and professor Michael J. Crosbie ('Architecture for Architects', 'Architecture for the Gods I and II'), Editor-in-Chief of 'InterFaith and Form' magazine. Former editor of 'Progressive Architecture' and 'Architecture' magazines. 288 col., 58 b/w