How community is expressed in place : spatial manifestations of two parishes

Abstract

I believe that we become human only through contact with one another, and I am interested in our architectural expression and accommodation of our life in communities specifically communities larger than the family and smaller than the city. I have chosen to look at two Catholic parishes as they are examples of community with a long history and a will to exist as a community for its own sake. This thesis investigates two drastically different Californian parishes, using interviews of the pastors, priests and nuns (the "leadership"), and analyzes , historically and architecturally, each parish. This investigation attempts to unveil the architectural language for community spaces implicit in these communities' created space and their perceptions and use of it. One parish realizes their conscious desire to intensify the sense of community not by being exclusive, but by accelerating activity within the parish and providing manifold opportunity for the members of the community to reach out to inhabitants of the greater neighborhood and city. By contrast, the other parish, after a turnover of ethnic groups in its constituency, has closed in on itself and reinforces a communal identity established with the tools of ecclesiastical dogma and purified ethnic identity. The contrast between the two parishes gives me the basis from which I can investigate an architectural language which appears to be essential in a conscious support of community life in our cities . The fundamentals of this language are described in the sections on "communal space " and "founded space". The formation of these two archetypes of community space is usually achieved through a dialectical process, where founded space is the built memory and again the seed for the flourishing of communal space; and a space. in which an active community thrives is always a response to and a re-formation of a space already founded.