Open Collections

Campbell, Stuart

This Graduation Project imagines a reorientation of sacred space towards the neighborhood. It stems in large part from my previous theological M. Div. studies at Regent College, emphasizing an outward-focusing understanding of space and place, and from my own previous pastoral work at Vancouver’s downtown First Baptist Church, recovering neighborhood parish. From a theological-pastoral perspective, far too often there is in Christian worship first Christian space and then—and only if we’re lucky—community space; however, these two kinds of space rarely overlap. This is because most church architecture fails to realize the essential premise that the church does not exist for herself, but for the sake of the neighborhood. In fact, this failure is directly connected with the many churches that are shuttering their doors in an increasingly “non-religious” (but still spiritual) age in Vancouver: church congregations and church architecture that exist for themselves will eventually peter out by themselves. How, then, can a church building still exist as a church—according to the typology’s standards of beauty, history, and inspiration—and yet still offer a home for others, so that there is a genuine mixing of lives and stories unto dignity and understanding? I argue that it must be by an upside-down approach to church architecture: one that espouses the power of sacred space to be hospitably of and for the neighborhood. As a project of thresholds and community-landing spaces, the Vancouver-sited church, located on a modest plot in Mt. Pleasant, seeks to combine spaces for Christian worship with residential housing, daycare classrooms, kitchen and dining facilities, and café and micro-brewpub community spaces. All these spaces—housed under one shared roof—are crafted with a shared theological-design language that incorporates five key principles: compression and expansion, light from above, indirect natural lighting, stained glass, and expressions of the cross. As these elements find their expression in the various spaces, all aspects of life are given equal theological and spiritual importance, thus invigorating the life of the local congregation in its neighborhood context, “inviting the outside in and thrusting the inside out,” and making a home for all.

Vancouver (B.C.)

Text

University of British Columbia. ARCH 549

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0442320

Applied Science, Faculty of; Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/