Week 1: Reverence

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain

This week, I have chosen reverence as my topic, because I believe that light in sacred spaces tells an impactful story by shaping the visual tone of an environment – close to what we strive to achieve in theatre. I took this photo on a point-and-shoot while I was traveling Europe in 2012. It is a window in the Sagrada Family Cathedral, designed by architect Antoni Gaudi in the early nineteen-hundreds. I chose this for reverence for a number of reasons, the first being my personal feelings about that sacred space, which relates to the feeling evoked when I look at this photo. I am not a religious person, but ultimately I don't think that religiousness is a requirement for respecting (or having reverence for) sacred spaces such as churches. When I walked into this cathedral five years ago, I was immediately transported into a world which existed in another dimension. It was profound to the extreme -– something I have neither felt before nor since. I maintain to this day that if there is a heaven, it looks like that place.
This feeling of total reverence had entirely to do with the relationship between light, space and architecture within the building. Gaudi was extraordinarily particular with the way light interacted with his buildings, because he believed that light was every bit as important as the space itself. Many of his buildings incorporate natural light as a primary light source, and so are filled with windows and flooded with sunlight. This space in particular is lit only with natural light. There are tinted, colorless and stained glass windows all along the high walls and arched ceilings, and light enters in such a way that the space is shaped and defined by it. A person could stand in one spot in the room for an hour and watch as the light shifts, and the space transforms with the passing of time. To me, this is the ultimate feat of design - creating a space that is intrinsically linked to the light that fills it, and so very naturally aids to telling the story of an environment. If a cathedral is a place for reverence (which I believe it is), then Gaudi has taken that concept and made it physical, visual, and visceral.