Author: Alli Preston Major: Interior Design Minor: Religious Studies 

In the Spring semester of 2020, I began my research related to Christian architectural design with assistance from my advisor, Associate Professor Kimberly Furlong. It is a contemporary design analysis of physical church spaces in NWA and how they portray what their members believe is important about those spaces. My research intentions leading up to the actual implementation of the study were for there to be a survey that gave me a highly straightforward understanding of congregants’ attitudes toward church space. It was also decided that this data would be compared to highly qualitative information gathered from my personal understanding of the churches as a design student, which would include visual photographic analysis. 

I started by searching churches within Fayetteville, AR to establish an understanding of church building phenomena in the area and help identify patterns of design that might influence survey questions. I discovered a range of building types that reflected what I had discovered in my background research: traditional-styled sanctuary worship spaces, large-scale modern designs that encompassed a variety of programs other than worship, and warehouse or strip-mall retail spaces. I began developing my survey, which addressed questions related to the function, beauty, and purpose of the church space, as well as sacredness.  

While the churches in Fayetteville provided an interesting basis for the research, I decided I wanted to keep the scope of my research on all of NWA, while also being able to have a more in-depth analysis of the churches I was going to study. Based on my understanding of the variations in spatial typologies, I selected five churches that represented these variations as well as ones that provided diversity in denomination and location within NWA. The selected churches were Cross Church Pinnacle Hills in Rogers, Harvest Bible Chapel in Fayetteville, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, St. Nicholas Orthodox Christian Church in Springdale, and Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs.  

In the middle of my research, the spread of COVID-19 caused the university and every kind of public gathering to cease. This had quite an effect on my research in regard to the distribution of my survey, but mostly it affected my plans for my design analysis of the church spaces. Churches were not as easily able or willing to digitally send out a survey to their congregants while they were already sending them so much information. Also, my ability to photograph the interior spaces and the churches filled with people was obviously hindered. I decided to maintain photography as a method of analysis but would confine its presence to the use of documenting the building’s exterior and immediate site context. Additional understandings of the space would now have to be developed as far as they could through existing descriptions, photos, and architectural drawings of the space that I could expand upon. 

As of now, I have begun to enact these unforeseen changes in the research and am working diligently to complete it in the midst of a pandemic. I traveled to most of the churches and began my photography and design analysis, which will continue to be developed further. Eventually, the completed research project will lead to a better understanding of the relationship between the Christian understanding of their built environment and how design is involved with it. The research has also generated new inquiries that make me excited to keep exploring and researching the world of religious experience and design.