A tectonics approach to architecture : a new church building for Buffalo

Abstract

Architecture can heighten an experience when it supports the mood of that experience and when it is felt to embody the idea or purpose of the experience. The challenge here is that the Christian Church comes into being wherever the people gather, so, the architectural task is to make an architecture that will heighten the congregation' s experience without the architecture coming to seem itself as the "carrier" of the tenets of belief. A tectonics approach to architecture can be used to convey certain characteristics of the Christian Church in such a way that a contribution is made to the experience of the congregation. Existing examples of tectonics in architecture are studied and a major thrust of the work is in the testing of the thesis in a design of a new building for the Word of Life Church, a Pentecostal Christian congregation in Buffalo, New York.