If God did come to earth last week, he would have found a packed house at the AIA Center for Architecture where the question of the evening was: “are current attitudes towards the environment affecting man’s attitude toward God… or conversely, are man’s changing attitudes toward God affecting our thoughts about nature?” Most importantly for this group, the discussion begged the question: how does all of this affect the architecture of religious spaces?

Rabbi Cohen of Temple B’Nai Chaim started the evening off with a simple Venn diagram that showed the overlapping relationships of man, God and nature paying particular attention to the area where all three intersect. She continued with quotes from sacred texts which glorify man, God and nature and emphasize their interrelationship.

Henry followed with a rapid history of sacred spaces over several millennia highlighting how prior to modern times religious spaces were viewed as sanctuary from this world. God was relegated to the heavens and man to the earth. Nature had no visible part in the equation.

St. Peter’s BasilicaHagia Sofia

The early modern churches and synagogues followed the old traditions of religious spaces as removed from nature and included for light but not to view and celebrate this world.

But times have indeed changed and today we see many examples of sacred spaces, which not only give glimpses of this world but indeed celebrate it as well. How did this happen? Has God indeed come to earth and we now find the sacred in Nature? Or has global warming warned us that man as master of the universe is not such a healthy notion after all?

Alexander Gorlin followed with a wonderful cartoon image that further begged the question of man’s relationship to nature:

Alex continued his religious references with a brief discussion of Tikkun Olam, or “repairing the world,” a sixteenth century Cabalistic notion which has recently been appropriated as a call to action for respecting and repairing the environment. Alex’s own synagogue designs include references to Cabal and emphasize the magic of natural light.

Victoria Meyers, who followed Alex, also glorifies natural light in her religious spaces and provides sensuously curved surfaces upon which they can reflect.

In his presentation, Michael Crosbie explained that the environmental movement is not just a secular issue but also reflects a change in theology. His presentation included many examples of green architecture from around the country. The most striking was of a Southern Baptist church with expansive windows overlooking the congregation’s cemetery. This example seemed to push the notion of confronting the realities of this world one step beyond any that we had seen before.

In the discussion that followed the presentations, the group again battered around the question of the evening: do our modern notions of sacred architecture reflect our changing attitudes towards god or our changing attitudes toward nature or both? As part of that discussion Henry turned to his client, Rabbi Cohen (Henry is the architect of her new synagogue in Connecticut) and asked, “Rabbi, when we decided to make the eastern wall of your new sanctuary all glass looking out to the woodland did you have biblical references in mind?” Her answer got a terrific response. “I can find scripture for any argument you put forward and I can find them for and against.” The rabbi continued to state that attitudes are not usually generated by one source but many overlapping ones and they are not fixed in time.

These remarks applied to the topic of the evening, bringing us to the conclusion that our new concepts of the interrelationship of God, man and nature are complex and their roots multi sourced. In a perplexing way, the effect may not be distinguishable from the cause. Applied to architecture there seemed to an agreement; the desire to bring nature into religious space is part of the zeitgeist of the architectural world without need for too much explanation.