White spirit: situating whiteness in contemporary church architecture
Jordan, K. 2023. White spirit: situating whiteness in contemporary church architecture. Architectural Histories. 11 (1). https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.10154
| Title | White spirit: situating whiteness in contemporary church architecture |
|---|---|
| Type | Journal article |
| Authors | Jordan, K. |
| Abstract | In his polemical tract, The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England published in 1843, AWN Pugin condemned the ‘vogue’ for whitewashed church interiors that had characterised Protestant iconoclasm: for him, the return to colour and darkness was an indispensable backdrop to the reawakening of ritual, tradition and the sacred. In 19th-century Christian theologies, colour (or the lack of it) was profoundly important: no decorative scheme was ever applied without considering the religious implications. The long history of whiteness as a trope in Christian visual culture has been well documented but little attention has been paid to its meaning in late modernity. In the 21st century, whiteness is understood as a polyvalent and freighted concept, bearing implications that reach beyond the religious and into secular critical discourses. In this essay, I explore the contemporary vogue for whiteness as a motif in church architecture, focusing on its political and cultural significance in relation to the decline of traditional Christian worship and the rise of ‘believing without belonging’. |
| Keywords | whiteness |
| spirituality | |
| architecture | |
| twenty-first century | |
| churches | |
| Journal | Architectural Histories |
| Journal citation | 11 (1) |
| ISSN | 2050-5833 |
| Year | 2023 |
| Publisher | Open Library of Humanities |
| Accepted author manuscript | File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Publisher's version | License CC BY 4.0 File Access Level Open (open metadata and files) |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.10154 |
| Web address (URL) | https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/10154/ |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 09 Dec 2023 |