Daylight has always had a special role to play in spiritual architecture: largely divorced from functional necessity, the hands of the architect turn light into a means of lending significance and effect to room design. An unforgettable example is the “Church of Light” in Osaka, Japan, in whose altar wall architect Tadao Ando inscribed two light slits which join to create a cross.
“New Spiritual Architecture” not only documents the versatile use of light with large-format photos, it also records the changing paradigms of spiritual culture. “Religion is currently being redesigned”, as expressed by the American Wallpaper* magazine. Especially in western countries traditional confessions are replaced by new religious sects, or they open themselves up towards new liturgies and new forms of buildings. In her book Phyllis Richardson documents the new plurality of beliefs with 41 churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples from all over the world. Her selection is divided into five chapters according to size, location and demand of the houses of God: “New Traditions”, “Interventions”, “Places of Refuge”, “Sublime Icons”, and “Modest Splendour”.
This is comprehensible, but rather meagre: in the endeavour to trace latest tendencies in spiritual architecture, the author has limited herself almost completely to architectural phenomena and seldom refers to religious contents. Depictions of historical models, which every design for a religious building has to examine, are restricted to individual cases. The historical models listed by the author in the introduction only go as far back as Le Corbusier’s chapel “Notre-Dame-du-Haut” in Ronchamp (1955). As a pure collection of projects “New Spiritual Architecture” is quite acceptable: the book illustrates excellent architecture and stimulates to reflect on the theme “spirituality”. A second survey with a comparable worldwide and inter-confessional horizon is presently not available.