Theology & Architecture

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My research on architecture begins with a question about human beings rather than buildings.

To build is to encounter a world that is already given and imagine that it might be otherwise. A wall, a room, a path, or a city begins with an act of projection: someone stands within the present world while imagining another possible arrangement of it. Architecture therefore makes visible a peculiar feature of human existence—the capacity not simply to inhabit environments, but intentionally to transform them.

My current book project, Exocentric Architecture: A Theology of Design, develops this capacity through the concept of exocentricity.

Human beings belong to nature. Yet we also possess an unusual capacity to gain distance from what is immediately given: to reflect upon ourselves, imagine possibilities beyond the present, and act intentionally upon the environments we inhabit. Architecture gives this paradox material form.

Buildings are consequently more than containers for human activity. They embody judgments about what human beings need, how we should live together, how we relate to nature, what should endure, and what kind of future is worth constructing.

The theological question of architecture is therefore not simply what makes a building sacred. It is what the act of building reveals about the creature who builds.

A second strand of this research asks what happens after a building has been made.

Architecture does not simply express human agency; it acts upon us in return. Buildings orient bodies, frame vision, direct movement, gather communities, produce thresholds, and create possibilities of encounter that did not exist before them.

This raises a specifically theological possibility: can a building become a site of divine encounter?

The question does not require architecture to contain God or to make divine presence available on demand. Instead, it asks how spatial relationships might condition attention, perception, and receptivity—and whether the room made by architecture might become room for an encounter that architecture itself cannot produce.

This work also leads into ecological questions.

Rather than asking simply where architecture ends and nature begins, I am interested in what the difficulty of drawing that boundary reveals about human beings. Buildings emerge from natural materials and enter ecological systems, yet they also bear the marks of intention, anticipation, and agency.

Architecture therefore provides a particularly concentrated site for thinking about the relationship between humanity and nature: not simply whether we belong to nature, but what kind of belonging is possible for creatures capable of deliberately transforming it.