American Sanctuary: Understanding Sacred Spaces

Preface

Preface This volume found its genesis in two iterations of a graduate research seminar entitled “American Sacred Space” taught in 2001 and 2002 in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia. Between the two iterations, the seminar drew students not only from my home department of Architectural History but also from Religious Studies, History, English, Landscape Architecture , and even from other universities. Students in those seminars read materials that ranged widely in scope, from theoretical treatises to case studies . We pitted Mircea Eliade against Lindsay Jones, the Victorian parlor against the Puritan meetinghouse, Niagara Falls against the African American yard, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple against storefront churches. Similarly diverse were the student research projects, which ranged from rural African American churches to the exhibition of the AIDS Quilt on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The diversity of their graduate training brought to the classroom discussions a complex mix of assumptions and expectations about what was and was not sacred space and about processes of sanctification. Even though they often disagreed about interpretive method, they shared a common desire to make sense of the sacred in space. Many of the student papers would later inform master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, and some have found their way into print in this volume and other venues. The intellectual energy and desire for understanding generated in those seminars lies at the heart of this volume. After the success of the first seminar, I organized a symposium to run in conjunction with the next. The symposium drew emerging and established scholars from very diverse fields and from institutions across the country to Charlottesville for two days of papers and field excursions. Few of the presenters knew one another and none of us knew everyone, but as the symposium unfolded there was a mutual enthusiasm about our shared interests. As a collection, the papers evinced a rigorous body of scholarship that was forging new ground in the interpretation of sacred space in America. Many of the papers delivered at that symposium also found their way into this volume. By including work by senior scholars and some graduate students in a way that highlights certain themes central to the study of sacred space, this collection seeks to gather together in a single volume the scholarship that will redefine the study of American sacred space. While the papers diverge widely in topic and method, they Nelson_AmerSanctuary 11/30/05 2:32 PM Page ix reach past traditional narratives on sacred spaces by dissolving disciplinary boundaries while crafting new modes of interpretation and seeking to strike a balance between the theoretical and the historical. The students of my seminars shared at least one question with the scholars who presented papers at the symposium: they all wanted to know what sacred spaces mean to the people who construct and inhabit them. American Sanctuary is a first step in answering that question. x Preface Nelson_AmerSanctuary 11/30/05 2:32 PM Page x ...