Architect Mario Botta has made places of prayer his area of specialty. He has designed churches, mosques, and synagogues all over the world. Church architecture describes visually the idea of the sacred, which is a fundamental need of man. He works primarily with brick, stone, and concrete, rather than glass and metal. I believe in the idea that architecture holds gravity and weight, and that it makes you feel the soil. He wants a building to rise up from a landscape as a natural part of it, rather than be imposed upon a landscape. I would recommend to all architects, as they design a square, a street, a hotel, to talk about a series of unfinished values forgotten by consumer society. He looks to nature to inform both form and content, using, for example, local limestone as his material for the Nuova Sede della Banca Nazionale in Athens, Greece. His first building design in the United States was the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1995, and as I pore over images of the museum, I decide there is something distinctly church-like about it. Especially the ocular atrium in the center. What is spiritual architecture? Does it need to serve a religious community, or is it any space designed to let the light in? I’ve never had the chance to visit a building designed by Mario Botta, but I often visit two James Turrell skyspaces, and everytime I do, peace washes over me and I feel my body relax. These are my churches: Meeting at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York, with its wooden pews and invitation to watch the sky, and C.A.V.U at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, built in a former water tower with an ocular lens and desert colors.
-Morgan English