There’s an interesting post on archizoo about the concept of ‘Cathedral Thinking’:

For Rogers, the concept was about the care and commitment of people who contributed to building the cathedral, a decades-long task, yet would never see its completion. Its implications on vision and strategy development seemed to be about their outcome, a recognition that the successful implementation of the strategy may not be measured until long after it authors have moved on.

I think  starts to hint at the basic reason I’m so ambivalent about the project I posted earlier where a cathedral was converted into a bookstore. There’s something serene and foreign in the concept of thousands of people devoting their lives to a project they know they will never see finished; the sacrilege of that conversion in my mind has less to do with replacing religion with commerce and more to do with respecting the aspirations of all those craftsmen.  Especially in the US, there are very few objects which have remained important for more than a couple generations. We’re not going to be able to embrace long-term sustainability as a culture without retaining some reverence for the past; they’re two perspectives on the same process.

There’s a surreal set of photographs at the library of congress taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii of various scenes in Russia, mostly around the turn of the century. This was long before color photographic paper was developed, and the images were taken using multiple exposures and color filters. The finished work was projected through color filters again to reconstruct the original image. The picture above has the following description:

The Solovetskii Monastery, founded in the early fifteenth century on an island in the White Sea in the far north of European Russia, was for centuries one of the most important monastic and cultural institutions in Russia. The thick walls shown in this photo protected the monastery from foreign invaders on several occasions. The monastery was partially destroyed in the early Soviet period and became the site of the first major concentration camp of the Gulag system. In the post-Soviet era it was returned to the Orthodox Church and is once again a functioning monastery.

Some more interesting shots:

Dezeen just published some photos of a cathedral remodel; the cathedral had been turned into a retail store.

I have mixed feelings about this project.  On the one hand, the design itself is both sensitive to the nature of the existing building and interesting in its own right.  The space is being used as a book store, and the ’stacks’ have been placed in the center of the space two levels high to retain the open majestic feeling of the nave.  The apse had been converted into a reading area filled with seats surrounding a cross-shaped table.  In all, the design is well executed.

But there’s something about this project that makes me uneasy.  Something about taking a cathedral – likely the result of centuries of work by thousands of craftsmen built as a sanctuary from the world of the profane being converted into a retail store seems like an unflattering commentary on the world we live in.

I’m neither religious nor a fan of historical preservation, so it surprises me that this project makes me uneasy; I suspect this is reflecting a growing uneasiness I’ve been feeling about our culture’s recent experiment with consumerism.  I feel like the slow monetization of virtually every aspect of our lives leaves us with a world that is lacking in both poetry and humanity.  Perhaps I’m just growing old enough to feel nostalgic for a past that never existed.

Hugh Pearman of the London Sunday Times has a great review (I won’t call it a critique) of Tschumi’s Parthenon Museum.  I’m very impressed with this building (based solely on this article – I need to do some more reasearch).  I have always been slightly dismissive of Tschumi; I lumped him in with Eisenman and dismissed him as a deconstructivism form maker.  This building has made me re-evaluate that impression and think that I should spend some time in Calvin’s library looking at his other work again.