The Religious Imagination in Modern and Contemporary Architecture: A Reader

This anthology collects, substaniates, and demonstrates the importance of the religious imagination within Western modern and contemporary architecture.

The essays written expressly for the anthology take a critical look at the relationship between religion and architecture in the twentieth century, as well as giving a brief look at the pre-history of the modern movement and its relationship to religion and architecture. These are grounded by and help to explicate the reprinted essays that are culled from the last one hundred years.

This is an important introduction to the religious imagination in architectural thought of the last one hundred years, and to the interdisciplinary discourse that examines how different disciplines express abstract concepts such as faith, spirit, God and knowledge. It makes essential reading for any architect, aspiring or practising, delving deeper into the meaning of architectural practice.

Renata Hejduk is an Associate Professor in The Design School at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Her research is focused on European and American avant-garde architecture and urbanism from around 1960 to the present and its development relative to the culture and philosophy of that period. Her work was most recently published in the interdisciplinary journal Culture and Religion, the Journal of Architecture, and Transportable Environments 3 (Routledge, 2006).

Jim Williamson is a Visiting Associate Professor in Architecture at Cornell University. He previously taught at Harvard University and the Georgia Institute of Technology and has been a Visiting Professor at numerous other institutions including Columbia University and the Cooper Union. He is co-editor and contributor of the forthcoming The Architecture of Disbelief and his work has been published in numerous books and journals including the recent Surrealism and Architecture (Routledge, 2005).