PS45 Religion in Secular American Architecture 15:00 - 17:10 Friday, 20th April, 2018 Meeting Room 5 Track Track 7

15:05 - 15:25

PS45 Republican Theology and the Beginnings of the Profession

Bryan E. Norwood Mississippi State University, Starkville, USA. Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

Abstract

Western architectural history has largely framed “the Enlightenment” as a process of secularization, and this narrative feeds into a view of modern architectural practice in the as a likewise areligious endeavor. I will complicate this perception by highlighting the extensive influence of what Benjamin Lynerd has recently called Republican Theology—thought that intertwines Calvinist theology, Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, and Republican political theory—on the architectural profession as it formed in the United States in the early nineteenth century. While secularized narratives tend to emphasize the founding role of and Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s largely agnostic views of architecture, I will focus on early professional architects, particularly (1804-1887), who were decidedly Protestant. Republican Theology, as developed by American intellectuals like the Founding Fathers John Witherspoon and Benjamin Rush, framed these architects’ conception of their profession’s task. Using Walter’s Lectures on Architecture, first delivered at the Franklin Institute in 1841, as an anchor, this paper will bring out two beliefs widespread in Early American architectural discourse that reveal the influence of Republican Theology: historical progress and associationist aesthetics. The concept of historical progress was used to imagine architecture’s national purpose. Drawing on the Scottish Enlightenment practice of “conjectural history,” architects like Walter understood the history of architecture as an expression of human nature. Humanity was positioned as a partial reflection of the divine, a creation that itself can create and collectively progress from rudeness to refinement. Likewise, the extensively used aesthetic philosophy of associationism was rooted in a view of this human nature as providentially endowed with common senses of taste, reason, and morality. By showing how these Republican Theological concepts were professionally operative, I will suggest that there is an endurance of a Protestant epistemic framework in what is imagined to be a secular profession. 15:25 - 15:45

PS45 From Oral Roberts’s City of Faith to Harvey Cox’s Secular City

Margaret Grubiak Villanova University, Villanova, USA

Abstract

Today, the CityPlex Towers, a trio of skyscrapers, offer more than 2 million square feet of commercial office space in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Yet the name CityPlex belies the skyscrapers’ origin as the City of Faith Medical and Research Center—the apotheosis of televangelist Oral Roberts’s Pentecostal belief in faith healing. Roberts built the City of Faith in 1981 as a realization of the City of God described in the Book of Revelation, complete with a 60-foot Healing Hands sculpture (figure 1). The complex was mired in financial difficulty from the beginning, becoming the object of satire as Roberts claimed to see a 900-foot Jesus holding up the City of Faith to garner donations for his medical ministries (figure 2). Roberts closed the City of Faith in 1989 and transformed it into the CityPlex Towers, removing the Healing Hands sculpture and overt religious symbolism. This paper explores the secularization of the City of Faith to the CityPlex Towers. Because of its dual religious and secular identities, the complex offers a window into the persistence of evangelical belief into the late twentieth century and the failures of American televangelism in overly ambitious projects that led to the scandals of the 1980s. In interesting ways, the City of Faith also engaged theologian Harvey Cox’s The Secular City (1965), which argued against “confining [the divine] to some specially delineated spiritual or ecclesial sector” and instead finding God in all places, including urban life.[1] That Roberts chose the skyscraper, an urban form, for his City of Faith placed religion and modernity in conversation, but the image of the CityPlex Towers today obscures that conversation. This paper offers a transformational example of religion in what is now a secular American architecture. 15:45 - 16:05

PS45 House as Axis Mundi of Mormon Space and Cosmology

Shundana Yusaf University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

Abstract

Beatriz Colomina once suggested that in 20th century the house was the primary site for investigating architectural ideas. In 19th century America, I would argue, it was the primary site for exploring social ideas. Victorians were the first to insist on a direct relationship between the cradle and agora. They were not only creative developers of secular public institutions, urbanization, and industrialization, but also prolific innovators of religious movements. Victorian prophets in America responded to the upheavals of secular developments by rethinking the house, where they could naturalize their experiments as tradition and convention. The polygamous house of the Mormons stands out in this context.

My contribution to the panel on “Religion in Secular American Architecture,” will look at two case studies in Utah: the Beehive House (1854) and Lion House (1856). The first was the official residence of the Governor of Utah Territories/ Mormon Prophet, Brigham Young. It was meant for his senior wife, Mary Ann Angell and her six children. The second, connected to Beehive, was built for 12 of his other 54 wives, and some of his 114 children. Mormons are unique in the American context in establishing a theocracy in 1848, enabling them to spatialize religion at architectural, urban and regional scale like no other group. These two projects offer the most layered and rich examples of the house as a testing ground for the radical redefinition of American family and the holy union of home and work, church and state.

Polygamy was a short-lived experiment that received divine sanction in 1843 and withdrawal in 1890 but its imprint can be seen in the layout of the city, Utah schools, department stores, women societies, and men’s clubs. My paper will connect these two houses to the larger spatial context of Mormon theology. 16:05 - 16:25

PS45 Park51 and the Precarity of Muslim-American Religious Spaces

Eliana Abuhamdi Murchie Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA

Abstract

In 2010, Sharif El-Gamal, founder of Soho Properties and a prominent figure of Lower Manhattan’s Muslim American community, launched the Park51 Islamic Community and Cultural Center project. The stated vision was to create a space to foster Park51 as an Islamic community and cultural center to promote dialogue and understanding of Islamic faith. The initial designs for the 13-story Islamic Center made a bold architectural statement, wrapped in an exoskeleton of abstract webbed pattern. This vision was not to be, however. Located less than two blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, the project faced political backlash. Critics ranged from conservative media and politicians to some families of 9/11 victims, citing the project as a monument to terrorist aggression. After a year of severe public scrutiny, El-Gamal withdrew the project, and, instead, proposed to transform Park51 into 45 Park Place, composed of a 43-story luxury condominium skyscraper with significantly reduced program for the Islamic Center, now only a three-story Islamic Museum. This paper explores the suppression of Islamic spaces in the transformation of Park51 to 45 Park Place by examining the social and cultural implications of the projects’ design iterations and programmatic changes. In this process, the flexibility of Islamic religious practices and spaces allowed the continual reduction of the religious aspects of the project–such as the prayer hall–in the program. More broadly, the history of the Park51/45 Park Place project illustrates how capitalist economy, coupled with political and cultural tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim American communities, eclipsed non-Western cultural production on the site. The paper also uses the Park51/45 Park Place project to examine the potential impact of market-driven logics and political tensions on the future of Muslim-American religious space in the U.S. 16:25 - 16:45

PS45 Ecological Theology

Kathleen John-Alder Rutgers University, News Brunswick, USA

Abstract

Early in his career, just as he was beginning to formulate the environmental manifesto that he famously presented in Design with Nature, the landscape architect Ian McHarg appropriated the following quote from the Puritan mystic Jonathan Edwards to describe his vision of landscape design: “Space is necessary, eternal, infinite and omnipresent, but I have as good speak plain, I have already said as much as space is God.” These words sanctify open space and they recover the world in all of its primal and revelatory power. For McHarg, as for Edwards, this sentence signaled a renunciation of tradition in favor of the personal insight obtained through direct observation of the land, and the nature of its air, water, plants and animals. As later reconstituted by the dramatic images of the sun and earth on the front and back cover of the first edition of Design with Nature, McHarg believed this celestial vision of space and time had to float in front of one’s eyes until the need for it became so visceral denial was not only blasphemous. It was impossible. This presentation explores the genesis of McHarg’s faith-based vision of the world using transcripts from his television program The House We Live In. Of particular interest, are his repeated attempts to unify his thinking under the umbrella of ecology, which he conceived as both a physical science concerned with elucidating material and energy flows and a secular metaphysic in which it was possible to conceive the earth and its processes as divine. In addition to his discussions with theologians representing Judaism, Catholicism, , Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, special attention is paid to his interviews with Julian Huxley, Arnold Toynbee, Kenneth Rexroth and Lewis Mumford and their proposals for secular alternatives to the environmental precepts of Judeo-Christian theology.