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How should we construct sacred spaces, the places where we worship? Transcending Architecture considers the mysterious, profound, and real power of designed environments to address the spiritual dimension of our humanity. By incorporating perspectives from within and without architecture, the book offers a wide, critical, and nuanced understanding of the lived relationship between the built and the numinous worlds.

Far from avoiding the charged issues of subjectivity, culture and intangibility, the book examines phenomenological, symbolic and designerly ways in which the holy gets fixed and experienced through buildings, landscapes, and urban forms, and not just in institutionally defined religious or sacred places. Acknowledging that no individual voice can exhaust the topic, Transcending Architecture brings together a stellar group of scholars and practitioners to share their insights: architect Juhani Pallasmaa and philosopher Karsten Harries, comparative religion scholar Lindsay Jones and architectural theoretician Karla Britton, sacred architecture researcher Thomas Barrie and theologian Kevin Seasoltz, landscape architect Rebecca Krinke and Faith & Form magazine editor Michael Crosbie, are among the illustrious contributors.

The result is the most direct, clear, and subtle scholarly text solely focused on the transcendental dimension of architecture available. This book thus provides, on one hand, understanding, relief, and growth to an architectural discipline that usually avoids its ineffable dimension and, on the other hand, a necessary dose of detail and reality to fields such as theological aesthetics, material anthropology, or philosophical phenomenology that too often fall trapped into unproductive generalizations and over-intellectualizations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julio Bermudez is an associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, The Catholic University of America.

" Transcending Architecture is an important and timely contribution to the study of sacred architecture and its relation to the numinous. In a time when religion is part of the world's political and sociocultural discourse it is important to revisit the issues of the relation of the sacred and humane. The significance of this volume is in its contribution to the examination of how the physical footprint of sacred spaces brings the human closer to the divine across faith, culture, and time." --Anat Geva, associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M University

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CHOICE Review

This book consists of 19 essays that grew out of a symposium held at the Catholic University of America in October 2011. Bermudez, the organizer of the symposium, invited 17 well-qualified thinkers from a variety of disciplines to explore the idea of transcendence in architecture. In his introductory essay, Bermudez makes an impassioned plea for the relevance and importance of this idea. The subsequent essays explore the topic from the perspectives of architects, landscape architects, urban planners, space planners, scholars, historians, theorists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, social workers, and teachers. Their varying perspectives lead the contributors to provide different definitions of transcendence and its relevance to architecture, sacred and secular. They are all thoughtful and thought provoking. Taken together, they illustrate the richness and the elusiveness of the idea of transcendence in architecture. The text is complemented by 62 handsome black-and-white photographs, extensive footnotes, a bibliography of resources relevant to transcendence, brief biographies of the contributors, and a detailed index. The book provides an excellent introduction to an important and timely topic. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --David Sachs, Kansas State University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Julio Bermudez is an associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning, The Catholic University of America.