"A design may communicate its purpose clearly, so that it's obvious what it is and what we should do with it. But its qualities, its aesthetic qualities particularly, speak to people in a different way. Consciously or not, people read meanings into artifacts. A chapel speaks a different architectural language than a supermarket, and everybody can read the difference. In a drugstore we can usually distinguish a medicine bottle from a perfume bottle even if we can't read the label. Artists and designers are trained to use the language of implicit meanings to add a rich communicative element over and above direct functional communication. If we only design the function of something, not what it also communicates, we risk our design being misinterpreted. Worse, we waste the opportunity to enhance everyday life. To designing for usability, utility, satisfaction, and communicative qualities, we should add a fifth imperative: designing for sociability."
Granted, Designing Interactions is a book about technology, and its message, delivered in a thorough exploration of the history of interaction design, is targeted toward technologists and those who design things for interaction with people. One might argue that I'm taking Smith out of context. To this I admit that she's not writing about sacred architecture; her point is at a general level to which the design of church architecture surely obtains relevance, even and especially toward the end of sociability as a design imperative.
so-cia-ble [French, from Latin sociabilis, from sociare, to share, join, from socius, companion]
(source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sociable)
We have intentionally designed many of our churches for a different kind of sociability than what existed prior to Vatican II. That more than a few Catholics see this as good thing illustrates the point. You can hear it in their parishes, even those designed and constructed in the pre-conciliar era of Latin rubrics, incense, and widespread concern for the poor souls. Where once the penitent believer knelt before the Blessed Sacrament to offer her prayers in silence minutes before Holy Mass, she now does so in the midst of much friendly chatter, reminiscent of the last cookout that she'd attended for the neighborhood block party. We Christians, after all, are not a glum lot. The line that has been drawn between the sacred and the profane isn't very clear, nor is the need for such clarity a shared value, least of all among those who would "turn our sacred places into meeting spaces," as stated in the fitting subtitle of Michael Rose's book, Ugly as Sin.
We would do well to recapture the proper balance between earthly and heavenly sociability. After all, it is in the Divine Liturgy that we enter into the liturgy of heaven where, among the angels and the saints, we offer the worship, prayer, and adoration due to God alone. Whether observing a Catholic church from the outside or from within, the design should "communicate its purpose clearly, so that it's obvious what it is and what we should do with it." In that bygone era left unexperienced by this blogger, Catholics routinely made the sign of the cross upon passing a Catholic church. They did so because they were attuned to heavenly sociability. And once inside, one might hear a pin drop before having their prayers disturbed by the mundane hum and titter that is encouraged by the communicative qualities, or lack thereof, in modern Catholic church architecture.
It is rather awkward to entertain idle talk in the midst of saintly statues, glowing votive candles, symbolically rich art, stations of the cross, and a shining, radiant tabernacle wherein earth connects to heaven in the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. The trappings of even the most modest church can incline one to the proper spiritual disposition, and the regal splendor of our greatest cathedrals will never attain to the glory of heaven, even though the creation and appreciation of such splendor in light of the fact forces upon us this indispensable realization.
Relevant Reading:
Designing Interactions
The Renovation Manipulation: The Church Counter-Renovation Handbook
Ugly As Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We Can Change Them Back Again (Forthright Edition)
In Tiers of Glory: The Organic Development of Catholic Church Architecture Through the Ages
