I am not religious. I look for spirituality in visual and musical explorations.
Musically I was drawn to the blues, improvisation around simple themes, finding complexity in happy accidents and the mood of the moment. My visual side has been entwined with the practicalities of building for so long that it’s difficult to disentangle the bricklayer from the artist.
Sacred buildings loom very large in the histories of architecture and building technology. In this blog I have explored the churches of Hawksmoor and Soane: Borromini and Corb. Formally and culturally there is great diversity in these examples. The world of Gothic Cathedrals is something else entirely.
One recent, happy accident was my decision to model Winchester Cathedral under extreme time pressure. That experience collided with current events and online conversations to goad me into attempting a similar exercise on Notre Dame. There are ambitious ideas floating around, but for the moment my focus is on a personal…