Environment and Art
2004 New York, New York
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002
Convener 2004
Thomas Slon (project architect at Arthur John Sikula, Associates; member of the American Institute of Architects)
Seminar Participants 2004
Seminar members: (in attendance) William Seth Adams, Cortland Bender, Richard Butler, David Caron, Andrew Ciferni, Frank Coady, Peyton Craighill, John Gallen, William Graham, Patrick Holtkamp, J. Philip Horrigan, Conrad Kraus, Dennis Krouse, Mario Locsin, Kenneth Meltz, James Moudry, Robert Rambusch, Jan Robitscher, James Ross, Arthur Sikula, Mark A. Torgerson, Richard Vosko
Visitors: Larry Hoy, Martin Rambusch, David Cooper
Seminar Report 2004
In light of New York City’s current preoccupation with memorializing the events of 9/11/2001 and those who perished in the catastrophe, we chose as our topic for exploration shrines and memorials and how they relate, or do not relate, to our liturgical interests. While examples of memorials and shrines throughout New York are innumerable, we chose to visit the Mosque of New York on 96th Street, The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and Grand Central Terminal. No one of these three buildings is a shrine in the narrowest sense of the word, yet seeing them under that rubric broadened our discussion of how buildings and places accumulate meaning and significance, and how people interact with such buildings and places. The Mosque, a relatively modern building designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill (a firm more famously known for their design of steel and glass office towers) contains no shrines, except perhaps for the mihrab niche that faces east. St. John the Divine, by contrast, contains numerous shrines of various sorts, from the crucifix with candles and prie-dieu before it to the encasement of an ancient quartz crystal. Grand Central Terminal, as architecturally church-like as any place of worship, is dedicated to a religion that is as secular as it is significant.
The discussion which followed the day of travel to the three sites was structured around a photo presentation of various shrines and memorials one sees around New York such as domestic shrines, garden shrines, roadside shrines marking fatal automobile accidents, devotional shrines and secular memorials in sacred places, monuments to historical personages, and buildings commemorating persons or events. The discussion led to an attempt at distinguishing shrines from memorials. In some cases a distinction was clear. The monument at Columbus Circle, or Grand Central Terminal, a sublime monument to progress and transportation, celebrates public values, but does not elicit the same kind of activity as the “Imagine” shrine at Strawberry Fields in Central Park or the shrine to St. Anthony in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. In these latter examples, the activity of bringing something to the shrine and leaving it at the site, such as flowers, candles, pictures, was significantly different from the mere recognition and intellectual acknowledgment of civic importance evoked by most public monuments.
But the distinction is not quite so clear in other cases. Enshrining the ancient quartz crystal in the Church of St. John the Divine is more than merely acknowledging the crystal’s existence or memorializing geological progress. At the same time, the AIDS memorials in the church or the memorial to fallen fire fighters apparently evoke activities more associated with shrines: flowers, candles, poems and pictures got left there by visitors. The difference between a shrine and memorial may be in the response of people upon encountering it; and any memorial may have the potential to become a shrine. At the same time, while the distinction between the two may facilitate discussion, what is of final importance is the apparent human need to memorialize and enshrine; the activities we engage in at those places; and the significance of the event, person, activity, and location combined, for the present and the future.
The immediate or accumulated significance of the shrine or memorial, the continuing presence encountered there, how that presence is created or evoked, and the human response to that presence by way of ritual action are issues yet to be explored by the group, with the expectation that the potential correlation between the ritual action at the shrine and the ritual action of the liturgy may shed light on both and reveal a compatibility as well as a difference between the devotional and the liturgical. The church building may very well contain shrines along its peripheral ambulatory, but does the church building act as a shrine in itself and, if so, what does it enshrine? The early Christian rejection of the former Temple paradigm, surpassed by the temple of the Spirit, the body of Christ enshrined in the people gathered, continues to be a nettling challenge to the human inclination to enshrine the Spirit in architecture. At the same time, the early Christian practices around the catacombs, as an example, would seem to indicate that liturgy, itself a memorial activity, calls for a place that does not just accommodate the activity but participates in it, as perhaps a memorial or shrine.