The “public Language” Of Church Architecture

Church buildings should be designed with consideration of how the general public will relate to the space they define. Church architecture is one language by which the witness of the church may be made known. Church buildings may be valuable to a community both as a space for communal activity and as a symbol of what community stands for. In a few pages of his classic book The Shape of the Liturgy, Gregory Dix described what it might have been like to come together for Christian worship in second-century Rome. It is very, very early on a Sunday morning, which was a working day in Rome. The setting is a somewhat generous home-typically a series of spaces surrounding the central atrium which might be open or covered. The tablinium, which is a couple of steps up, is the place of the bishop and elders. Others mostly assemble in the atrium, which has its pool, the impluvium, and the cartibulum, a small, blocky Table. There are many elements of the event that endure to this day, and others…