Sacred Architecture and scale

            I was talking to a Sofia last night, a Greek Architecture graduate student, studying here in Berkeley on a Fulbright, about this theatre project in general and specifically about the Hagia Sophia.  I asked: “From your perspective as an architect, what was it about that building that imbued it with that sense of sacredness?” I used the word awe to describe my own feelings, and she said that word fit perfectly for her as well.  As a school kid in Greece they heard and read about the Hagia Sophia:  it’s history and it’s art.  But reading didn’t prepare her for how she felt the first time she visited it when she arrived in Istanbul at 21.  “I hadn’t even planned on seeing it—I was more interested in the mosques and just wandering through the city, but I thought, okay, I’m here in Istanbul let me see this famous building.”  And when she walked up to it, even before entering, she said she just looked, amazed and in awe, taking it all in.

            It’s a matter of scale she said.  That feeling the building creates causing a person to feel small in comparison to the surroundings.  I agree.  Small.   But, somehow, not insignificant—at least for me there is a deep sense of connectedness to something larger than myself that I also felt.   A similar feeling I have when I am surrounded by the 14,000 peaks of the Sierra Nevada.   And that led us to talk about other sacred buildings and how they accomplish this architecturally.  And then it hit me.  I thought of all the sacred places we visited in Greece and Turkey on our Fulbright:  The Orthodox churches in Thessaloniki, The churches hovering on rocks in Meteora,  Phillip II’s tomb in Macedonia, The tombs of Atreus at Mycenae , the Christian churches carved into rocks in the Cappadochia region of Turkey, The Mosques of Istanbul, all the ancient Hellenic and Roman theatres of Greece and Turkey (there are dozens), and of course the most sacred of all:  The oracle of Delphi.  I thought of these places and thought of how, even with all our expectations in place (a sure precursor to disappointment), we enter these holy places and feel something, something deep and powerful, something eternal.  Is it scale that causes this?  Is it scale that can lead to tears while sitting alone in the Theatre at Delphi, watching the sun’s last rays reflect orange on the surrounding rock cliffs, while the columns of the ruins of the temple of Apollo create a perfect foreground to this magnificence?  I can't be sure, but it seems like a good starting point.  But again, my job is to turn these thoughts and ruminations into something my students can turn into theatre. Viewpoints, is a good place to work on this for one of the key viewpoints is what Anne Bogart calls:  Architecture.  In that viewpoint we will use a series of activities that encourages participants to become acutely aware of where they are and let the architecture inform their movement.  We'll see where it goes Monday.