This special issue of Interiors contains seven articles which approach the unique challenges presented by designing spaces for the purposes of shared religious worship or private reflection. As a group, these studies examine such issues as the impact of ritual and rhythm on the experience of interior spaces, the role of narrative and abstraction in the special circumstances presented by this typology, and the significance of light and landscape in the quest for community or for what is often referred to, appropriately enough, as “spiritual illumination.” Drawing on the conventions of traditional religious architecture and on a range of new formal languages associated with Modernism, the examples considered here range widely across architectural “styles,” offering an array of fascinating alternatives to the challenges presented by varying programs, design conditions, and human experiences.
This issue presents a timely reflection and investigation of the design and use of spaces of faith, offering a broad sweep of approaches, methodologies and subjects as has become characteristic of this journal. David Gilbert et al. investigate The Sacred and the Suburban: Atmospherics, Numinosity and 1930s Interiors in Ealing, London. That article compares a purpose-built church and a cinema, both constructed during the 1930s in west London. Interestingly, the cinema was later converted to a place of worship, and the authors compare and contrast the use and popularity of the two spaces. Alice T. Friedman in Through the Network of Wires: Portsmouth Abbey, Richard Lippold, and Postwar Syncretism offers an account of the design and building of Portsmouth Abbey Chapel in the US, a project associated with a monastery and a school which challenges the accepted canon of post-war American religion, sculpture and modernist architecture. Our focus then moves to Belgium and Caroline Voet’s Between Ima Summis and Nearnes: Dom Hans van der Laan’s Roosenberg Abbey as an Example of a Contemporary Space of Worship, which again considers the design language of a relatively recent interior as a site of religious ritual and spiritual experience. Karen Lens and Koenraad Van Cleempoel turn our attention to Monasteries – the Layered Capture of Rhythm in Space and Time Through Rituals by ‘moulage’ and take a fresh look at the programs and patterns of monastic life, offering alternative strategies for the re-purposing of interiors by contemporary users. Ruth Mason takes us further back in history to investigate A ‘More-than-Architectural’ Approach to Faith Spaces: Wesleyan Methodist Spaces in London, 1851–1932 with a particular focus on the congregational experience of the Methodist religion. Valerie Fraser’s Accommodating Religious Tourism: The Case of the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico examines the contrast of colonial and modern architectures at a single, active, populist site where visitor experience and overall design are shaped by both religious and political contexts and objectives. The special issue finishes with Lamia Balafrej’s Islamic Iconoclasm, Visual Communication and the Persistence of the Image, a broad-based, historic view of iconoclasm and Islam, a subject of particular significance for present-day readers.
It is fitting that this special issue of Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture is co-edited with Alice T. Friedman. A historian and design scholar, she contributed to the launch issue of this journal in 2010 with her excellent article Home on the Avocado-Green Range: Notes on Suburban Décor in the 1950s. She has remained a staunch supporter of the journal ever since, and suggested the topic of spiritual space for this special issue.
This will be my last issue as Editor-in-Chief, and I am sad to be stepping down. My founding Co-Editor was John Turpin, always positive, efficient and with an excellent knowledge of the field – we set out to bring together the best critical work on the interior from around the globe. We won the CELJ (Council for the Editors of Learned Journals) prize in 2011 for ‘Best New Journal’ and over the intervening five years the journal has gone from strength to strength. When John Turpin stepped down as Co-Editor in 2014 he stated that change was good and I agree. Now that the journal has a new publisher, it is time for me to move on. I leave Interiors in the very capable hands of Lois Weinthal, who readers of this journal will know as a leading writer, researcher and teacher in the field. I know she has exciting plans for the publication and I look forward to seeing its continued growth and ability to excite, inform and provoke.