Reading Religious Architecture

A striking and continuing characteristic of accounts of religious faith and practice (particularly in the West) is their blindness towards the importance of architecture. ¹ This is peculiar in that religious buildings are a part of the context in which faith and practice is generated and sustained. ² There are texts dedicated to religious buildings and these may, and often do, serve to ground further analysis of the relationship between faith and practice and building. ³ However, such texts often contain little or no discussion of the relationship between the buildings which are sometimes sumptuously presented and those which exist primarily as religious (or other) space. Those accounts which do describe and examine this relationship are relatively few and far between, however, and their rarity prompted this present exercise. What follows is certainly not a finished account of the ways in which we read (and write about) religious architecture, but rather a platform on which others might hopefully build. ⁴