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Thin Places – Where Architecture Meets God

The Cathedral of Brasilia

The Cathedral of Brasilia was designed by my favorite architect, Oscar Niemeyer, and completed in 1960. You enter the church by descending a large ramp into a dark underground antechamber before rising into the cathedral and being swept up into its soaring, light-filled sanctuary with angels floating overhead. Niemeyer was a communist and an atheist, but he knew the Christian story and designed a building where believers are ‘baptized’ or ‘buried’ as they enter the cathedral and rise into the sanctuary to be ‘born again’ every Sunday.

The Dancing House, Prague

I don’t generally like postmodern architecture but the Dancing House in Prague just makes me smile every time I look at it. It is just so ridiculously out of place in its old Art Noveau neighborhood. Designed by Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry in 1996, it comprises two towers resembling a dancing couple (Gehry referred to them as “Fred and Ginger”), and features 99 differently-shaped adjoined facade panels, and every room in the building is asymmetrical. It is completely, utterly bonkers!

Seattle Central Library

I arrived in Seattle late one night, went straight to my hotel room and threw open the curtains to be confronted by the strangeness of the Seattle Central Library. At night, it looks like a spaceship has landed in downtown Seattle. Designed by Rem Koolhaas in 2004, the 11-story library features a “Books Spiral,” where the collection spirals up through four stories on a continuous series of shelves (so as not to break up the Dewey Decimal System classification onto different floors or sections). It’s fun, functional, and at night it’s kinda cosmic.

The Sydney Opera House

You might have guessed that sooner or later I would include the most famous building in all Australia. The Sydney Opera House was designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon and opened in 1973. As a kid I toured the construction site for a school excursion. One of our daughters has performed there. And, of course, we’ve seen countless concerts there (including opera). I really love it. In fact, I can’t even imagine my hometown without this gorgeous, elegant, playful masterpiece dominating the cityscape.

Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg

I just so happened to be in Winnipeg when the Antoine Predock–designed Canadian Museum for Human Rights opened in 2014. I loved it as soon as I saw it. With its limestone ramparts, layers of curved glass, and tower of hope, the CMHR evokes the wings of a dove — the symbol of peace — enfolding itself. Why Winnipeg? Well I asked, and they told me the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 deeply affected the evolution of the Canadian civil rights movement, particularly the advancement of Aboriginal peoples, women, French speakers and workers. Cool.

S R Crown Hall, Chicago

I find this building so elegant and peaceful, I could look at it for ages. Intended as the College of Architecture building at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed it as a simple, open hall with a suspended roof and no interior columns. And yet for all the glass and steel it feels warm and inviting. It definitely follows the modernist dogma, “less is more.” In fact, van der Rohe once described the building as “almost nothing.”

Habitat 67, Montreal

Habitat 67 was designed by the Israeli-Canadian architect Moshe Safdie as a solution for high-quality housing in dense urban neighborhoods. He wanted to see if prefabricated modular units could be used to create beautiful low cost homes and got it built in time for the World Expo in Montreal, 1967. The result is this zany, whacky mess of stacked concrete “boxes” in variant geometrical configurations. Public housing never looked so good. Hilarious and clever.

 

This article on thin places originally appeared here, and is used by permission.