Lost Churches of Mississippi

Glossary

-  arcade ; blind arcade In formal architectural terminology, an arcade is a row of arches, or in some cases a porch or covered walkway placed behind a row of arches. The arches of an arcade are typically open, but in some instances a row of arches may be applied to the surface of a wall as decorative element (particularly in Romanesque or Romanesque Revival architecture), with only a solid wall within each arch, in which case it is said to be a blind arcade. In the design of Romanesque Revival churches, blind arcades are most typically applied in a miniature form underneath eaves, and particularly under the sloping or“raked” eaves of a gable-end wall. These are normally “corbelled” arches, which means arches made of bricks or stones that step outward from the wall; hence, a miniature arcade along the eaves of a Romanesque church is typically a corbelled blind arcade. (See corbelling.)The use of arcades as architectural features is called arcading. auditorium; nave; sanctuary In the terminology traditionally used to describe churches, particularly the medieval churches of England and France,the part of the interior of a church building where the congregation is assembled is called the nave. In this traditional terminology, the word sanctuary refers only to the chancel—the area immediately surrounding the altar. In some of the more highly liturgical churches these terms are still used in this way, particularly if the building is a“High Gothic” church that carefully emulates medieval Gothic models . During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries , there was not any need for a particular word to describe the primary worship space within a church, because the architectural form of a church typically consisted of one structure that contained only one large room. In the latter part of the nineteenth century , churches began to have other interior spaces— lecture halls, Sunday school rooms, parish halls, etc., and it became useful to have a word that pertained specifically to the main worship space. Among evangelical churches the usual term to describe this space was auditorium (particularly after the introduction of the auditorium-plan church). Some denominations, particularly Presbyterians, preferred the word sanctuary , the meaning of which was expanded to include the entire worship space and the building that contained it, when there were other buildings in a complex . Both widely used today, the terms sanctuary and auditorium were both used in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.In her book When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in NineteenthCentury America, Jeanne Halgren Kilde writes, “The terms auditorium, audience room, and sanctuary were all commonly used during the last third of the nineteenth century to designate the main worship room of evangelical churches. Adopting the term sanctuary , Congregationalists and Presbyterians indicated the extent to which the interest in liturgics and more Glossary  GLOSSARY High Church worship forms popularized during the Gothic Revival period had achieved a lasting place in their religious symbol system” (note 3 on p. 249). auditorium plan church An auditorium-plan church is a church that is designed in such a way that its congregational seating area has the form of a theater, having a sloped floor and curved seating placed so that each seat has a good view of the pulpit or rostrum. The seating normally consists of pews arranged in concentric circular arcs, centered on the pulpit. Typically the pews are placed so that the center of the room, in front of the pulpit, is filled with seats, and the aisles radiate at angles off to either side, so that there is not a center aisle (much to the chagrin of modern-day wedding planners, who like to have a wide center aisle for the bride’s procession). The auditorium plan is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the Akron Plan. That term actually refers to an approach to the conducting of Sunday school classes that was promoted at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century that utilized a group of small classroom spaces that opened into a center auditorium, or sometimes into the main auditorium of the church. The term is also used to describe a church designed to accommodate this type of Sunday school; but it refers to the arrangement of classroom spaces opening into the auditorium , not to the design of the auditorium itself. bay A bay, in architecture, is the space between two regularly recurring structural elements, such as columns or...