Orientation and Place in Christian Sacred Architecture: Between Place-boundedness and Place-lessness

Isabel Potworowski
University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
potworil@ucmail.uc.edu

Myth and place in relation to sacred architecture are integral aspects of its orienting function. According to American scholar of religions Lindsay Jones (1954-2020), “orientation, or the human quest for a ‘place’ in the world, is the fundamental religious question,” and this orientation is imposed or discovered through the natural environment, manipulation of the built environment, and through ritual(1). Sacred places and buildings orient in relation to time and place, to sacred myth, history, and memory, and to the metaphysical realm. 

This paper examines the role of place in how sacred architecture provides orientation with a focus on Christian churches and chapels. Several dimensions of orientation are examined, including physical orientation towards the cardinal directions and immediate surroundings, intellectual and temporal orientation towards the history of a place, of salvation history, and towards theological meaning, and ontological orientation of one’s existence in relation to a larger whole, all of which are in service of spiritual orientation towards the divine. The paper describes a spectrum of orienting approaches between opposing tendencies: the place-bound and the place-less. 

Methodologically, the paper borrows concepts related to place and orientation from church documents and literature in theology, religious studies, and phenomenology of space, which are used to analyze a selection of buildings (drawings, photos, and descriptions), arranging them on a spectrum from place-bound to place-less and identifying categories between these two poles.

On one end of this spectrum, the orienting function of sacred architecture is closely related to place; examples include churches built on the tombs of saints and martyrs (a prominent example being St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome), or on other sacred pilgrimage sites, such as the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Other sites gain significance from histories of destruction and rebirth, such as the Madonna in the Ruins Chapel in Cologne, built on the post-WWII ruins of the Sankt Kolumba Church, or the rammed-earth Chapel of Reconciliation in Berlin, with walls that contain rubble of the previous church. The role of place in the experience of sacrality has been described by Italian philosopher Tonino Griffero, who observes that “certain places exert a special ‘spiritual’ influence on people.”(2) He attributes this influence to its genius loci, which he defines as “an atmosphere or ‘pervasive quality’” with a “particular intensity” and “authority.”(3) In the Christian tradition, especially in recent decades, orientation and connection to place is reflected in churches that engage with nature, reflecting environmental awareness and panentheistic sensibilities. Seeing nature as a reflection of God has roots in the teachings of St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181-1226), among others, and the connection with the natural world has been emphasized in Pope Francis’s (1936-2025) 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, prompting sustainable material choices and design in sacred architecture, especially in Latin America and Europe. An example is the ten Vatican chapels at the 2018 Venice Biennale that were meant to blend with natural surroundings. Integration with gardens or natural elements is also characteristic of churches influenced by eco-theology, one example being the St. Gabriel Passionist Parish in Toronto by (fellow ACSF member) Roberto Chiotti (with Larkin Architect), informed by the writings of American Catholic (Passionist) priest Thomas Berry (1914-2009). These various dimensions of orientation – to the sacred history of a site, to spirituality of place, and to the presence of God in nature – emphasize the place-boundedness of sacred architecture. 

The other end of the spectrum is place-lessness, related to the transcendence of God. In his 2009 book Religion: From Place to Placelessness, Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1930-2022) proposes that religion has a “directional thrust” from an emphasis on place and power to one on the rational and abstract.(4) He describes this shift in Christianity, beginning with Jesus’s choosing a particular community and place – the Israelites and the twelve apostles – to the expansion of the community to the gentiles and beyond.(5) He cites Jesus’s foretelling of the hour when one will no longer go to Jerusalem, but will “worship the Father in spirit and in truth,”(6) a statement that he relates to the notion of “a God who is everywhere and nowhere.”(7) He proposes that, for Christians, “the true home […] is never a geographical place […]. It is always elsewhere.”(8) For him, place-lessness in religion is “a precondition for – and a sign of – enlightenment,”(9) as opposed to the worldly, material, institutional, and location-specific dimensions.(10)

Tuan’s reading of Christianity points to a tension between place-boundedness and place-lessness that has long existed in the Church. The Eucharistic celebration is not restricted to a specific place; in this sense, Christianity differs from Greek and Egyptian temples, where location-orientation was a means of embodying the geophysical identity of deities.(11) The apostle Paul said to the Athenians that God “does not dwell in sanctuaries built by human hands;”(12) and that the faithful, in whom God’s spirit dwells, are the temple.(13) In The Spirit of the Liturgy(14), the late pope emeritus Benedict XVI (1927-2022), then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, asks: “Can there really be special holy places […] in the world of Christian faith? […] is the whole world not now [Christ’s] sanctuary?”(15) However, he points out that “the transition from Temple sacrifice to universal worship ‘in spirit and truth’” is not yet fulfilled; we live in an “in-between” time of “already and not yet,” in which we need sacred spaces and earthly signs as mediators of heavenly realities.(16) The tension is one of “already and not yet,” of material reality and the spiritual reality of which it is a sign. This tension is especially present in the paradox of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, according to which God was made man, giving significance to the unique and the concrete (to particulars, in the Aristotelian sense, as opposed to Platonic ideas) as a manifestation of the divine.(17) 

While churches cannot be entirely place-less, being structures built for specific communities, and often marking places within their context, their physical location and surroundings can at times seem to exert little influence on their design and their orienting function. In the celebration of the liturgy, the sacred arises from the Eucharist and from the memory and re-enactment of salvation history. Orientation is often less towards the immediate surroundings of the church, and more towards the heavenly Jerusalem. There is a separation from place, in line with French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s (1858-1917) definition of the sacred as something set apart for the divine.(18) Moreover, as Tuan observes, churches can “be raised almost anywhere with the appropriate rites of consecration.”(19) Many churches, in their outer form or interiors, point to places and contexts other than their own: examples include the Stations of the Cross that point to Jerusalem,(20) or imitations of sacred sites, such as those of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome,(21) or of Lourdes grottoes. 

Place-orientation in Christian sacred space is, in a sense, paradoxical: it is characterized by this tension between the place-bound and the place-less, between the immanent and transcendent, between concrete materiality and the absolute. 

Footnotes

1.  Lindsay Jones, The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison, vol. 2 (Harvard University Press, 2000), 31.
2.  Tonino Griffero, Places, Affordances, Atmospheres: A Pathic Aesthetics (Routledge, 2020), 137.
3.  Griffero, 144. Griffero attributes the phrase “pervasive quality” to American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952). 
4.  Yi-fu Tuan, Religion: From Place to Placelessness (Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2009), ix.
5.  Tuan, 44.
6.  John 4:21 and 23, cited in Tuan, 44. 
7.  Tuan, 44.
8.  Tuan, x.
9.  Tuan, 51.
10.  Tuan, 47-50, 53, 54.
11.  P.J. Quinn and editors, “Church Architecture, History of,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2^nd ed., vol.3 (Gale, 2003), 673. https://cvdvn.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/new-catholic-encyclopedia-vol-3.pdf, accessed November 8, 2025.
12.  Acts 17:24 (New American Bible)
13.  1 Corinthians 3:16 (New American Bible). Paul writes: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
14.  Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (translated by John Saward, Ignatius Press, 2000)
15.  Ratzinger, 53.
16.  Ratzinger, 61.
17.  On the relation of the concrete and the absolute and the place of the incarnation, see the introduction of Hans Urs von Balthasar in A Theology of History  (Sheed & Ward, 1963) 5-22.
18.  Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (Free Press, 1995), 34. See also Tuan, 16.
19.  Tuan, 11.
20.  Although, as religious studies scholar Sarah Lenzi argues in The Stations of the Cross: The Placelessness of Medieval Christian Piety (Brepols, 2016), the Stations of the Cross were intended as an imitation of Christ rather than imitation of travel to the earthly Jerusalem. 
21.  Examples include the Basilica in Oudenbosch, the Netherlands (1892), the Basilique Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix in Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire (1989), and the Mary, Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal, Canada (1894).