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Cathedral's Speciation
In a milieu of genome mapping, terabyte-scale personal media management, nano-scale medicine, and private space tourism, the majority of Americans still believe in Creationism over Evolution. America is not just a religious country, it is a country of religiosity. Everything - shoes, cars, soda pops, diet regimens, operating system preferences - is not just marketed, they are all evangelized. Here (perhaps especially in California) the intertwining of personal redemption and self-realization is deep in the local character.
One reason America is good at designing new spiritual products is because it is so good at creating the demand for them. In this studio we designed a new Mega church for an evangelical, charismatic Protestant Christian congregation in downtown LA. We carefully studied Gothic religious architecture (among the most beautiful spaces ever created) to consider their success in marrying the social, spiritual, political, and sensual into a single design. We immersed ourselves in local Mega churches to directly empathize with the needs of this varied, complex client base.
The contemporary Mega church is sometimes an opportunistic adaptive re-use, taking over basketball arenas, warehouses even parking lots as needed, and always inheriting some of the atmosphere of these. As forms, they have scale but often insufficient sacrality; they don't achieve the same resolution of political and sensual grandeur of cathedrals of the past. Part of our task was to give a more official, more contemporary, more fantastic form to these emergent political bodies.
The studio proposed to re-examine the possibilities of form generation as an autonomous entity. In the context of these conditions, the studio focused in the generation and production of mutant micro-behaviors that would accumulate to create species from systems.
Samuel Brissette
Michael Contento
Jin Pyo Eun
Raina Li Kim
Yong Ju Lee
Philip Lin
Clinton Miller
Olivia Ramos
Lindsey Sherman
Jon Turkula
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