Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth

Constructing Nature at a Chapel in the Woods

 Constructing Nature at a Chapel in the Woods R I C H A R D R . B O H A N N O N I I INTRODUCTION The worlds in which we live are ripe with images of nature: as our mother, as a wilderness to be tamed, as a divine gift to be stewarded, or as a pure and idyllic garden. Nonhumans appear to us as ‘‘nature’’ largely (or perhaps entirely) through such systems of human, symbolic constructions , often replicating or justifying power relations between humans. Nevertheless, while nature comes to us mediated through human symbols , it is not reducible to our social constructions.1 Nonhumans—both living and inanimate—continue to exist apart from human representations of them. Perhaps even more significantly, however, we humans also ‘‘see’’ and tangibly experience nonhuman nature as something constructed into built environments made useful for ourselves. Trees are transformed into lumber, mountains into asphalt, oil into plastic. The social construction of ‘‘nature,’’ in other words, often happens through the physical manipulation of it. Human constructions of the nonhuman into ‘‘nature’’ thus do not happen merely through symbols and representations; the nonhuman world is continually and literally constructed into new objects and terrain for human use. It is these kinds of construction, physical and yet also signifying, that shape human action, continually narrating how we smell, touch, feel, and see the nonhumans around us, whether they be trees, asphalt, or plastics. Particularly in the built environment, we doubly ‘‘construct’’ r i cha r d r . b oh a n no n i i 兩 469 nature, creating stories and symbolic constructions about nonhumans (and thus humans) through our physical manipulation of them, our material constructions. On a very basic level, for instance, the transformation of nonhumans into building materials also, and more abstractly, transforms them into economic resources; a tree in a forest is part of ‘‘nature,’’ and a tree in a hardware store is a piece of lumber with a fluctuating price based on supply and demand. In many instances our constructed environments are undoubtedly necessary, as they provide needed shelter and protection. Especially in contemporary industrialized societies, however, our buildings all too often serve to distort or to blind us from our relationships with the nonhuman world, creating a dichotomy between inside, humanized spaces, and outside, naturalized spaces. With religious architecture, furthermore, the stakes are raised. Not only do we play out our understandings of how the divine relates to the human—encoded, of course, in the human power-relations that regulate style, materials, and physical possibilities—but we also sacralize what it means to be human and nonhuman.2 While no building can represent all religious architecture—just as no congregation represents all of Christianity or all religions—the bulk of this essay will nonetheless focus on a small but significant building, Thorncrown Chapel, and use the work of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu to question how the ‘‘human’’ and the ‘‘natural’’ become constructed through the built environment. While Thorncrown is not entirely alone in departing from normative Christian architecture, in its relative uniqueness the chapel provides a helpful and more transparent example of how ‘‘humans’’ and ‘‘nature’’ are constructed in religious architecture. This is due in part to the chapel’s influence and fame in American religious architecture in the twenty-five years since its completion , but, more significantly, because the building’s fame derives precisely from its relationship to its immediate environment. As a building that, in the architect’s words, ‘‘aligns itself with the attributes of nature,’’3 the chapel provides a challenge both to the lines often drawn between humans and nonhumans, as well as to what it means to ‘‘construct’’ those boundaries. THORNCROWN: ACTORS A ND ASSOCIATIONS Thorncrown Chapel is a relatively small structure set in the woods near the tourist town of Eureka Springs, in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, 470 兩 e c os p i ri t with seating for one hundred people amid glass walls and wooden beams. Intentionally hidden behind a thin veneer of trees and a curving path, it is marked by three features that dominate the simple, rectangular building : a complex, geometric series of wooden trusses; a gabled metal roof, reminiscent of both Japanese and local architecture; and daylight, eagerly welcomed by a large, central skylight and walls of translucent glass. Run by evangelicals but not affiliated with any denomination, it does not...