2019 | Landscape | Unbuilt

A Church is sited at Jamaica Pond in the Emerald Necklace Park of Boston. The history of landscape in relation to religious revivals in the American Northeast and throughout the South relates the transcendent qualities of religious fervor to the expansive, “natural” wonders of the American environment. A Church questions the spatial archetype of religious institutions by subverting the inherent collectivity of worship and religious ceremony. Instead, the design utilizes the demands of individual faith as precedent.

The site is divided into 3 spaces based on the temporal organization of a church service: the word, the music, and the prayer. Each of these segments is divided by a large black wall, which serves as a physical thresholds, using the time and labor of crossing the wall as a transformative space for the next segment of the church. Churchgoers first encounter a field of black obelisks engraved with bible verses. The music holds the choir that is divided into individual rooms, where the churchgoer encounters a performace by individual choir members that can only be heard as a collective when projected outside of the music structures. The architecture takes as precedent Gothic church styles and Southern one-room wooden churches. The ritual ends with the prayer that is oriented towards Jamaica Pond for the intersection of religiousity and nature.