Visual Arts: Architecture and Liturgical Art

This showcase will explore resources to help you think in new ways about your worship environment, the architecture and the permanent or temporary visual installations that can not only enhance our praise and prayer but be praise and prayer.

By:

Elizabeth Steele Halstead

Tags:

architecture, liturgical arts

Topic Showcase

posted on February 29, 2012

Our senses (what we hear, smell, touch, taste, and what we see) provide the means through which we worship God.  Deepening and sharpening how and what we see are beneficial to all worshipers, not just those who consider themselves artists. This showcase will explore resources to help you think in new ways about your worship environment – the architecture and the permanent or temporary visual installations that can not only enhance our praise and prayer but be praise and prayer. 

Key Insights

1. Walk into your space with new eyes. What would a first time visitor’s eyes go to first? What does this say about what we do in this space? Is this what we want to say?  Everything you see communicates a message. Start with what is already being communicated before you integrate new visual ideas.
2. Think in terms of “visual layers.” The architectural elements of the space, the furniture arrangement, the natural visual elements of worship (Lord’s Supper and Baptism are the most inherently visual actions of worship), the seasons of the Christian calendar, and then a specific Sunday service and its theme. Together these create a visual whole.
3. Serve in community. An ideal visual arts team is made up of artists and crafters, but also construction workers, people organizers, people who study scripture, even someone who says “I don’t get it” – each can bring gifts to the team that will help the whole congregation worship more deeply through the visual.

Publications

An Architecture of Immanence 
by Mark Torgerson
(Eerdmans, 2007)
Modern architecture has heavily influenced the construction of new sacred spaces, producing a new way of building that emphasizes God’s coming near to us.