Allan Doig – författare

The History of the Church through its Buildings takes the reader to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the standing history of passing waves of humanity. This process takes on special significance in churches, where the arrangement of the space places members of the community in relationship with one another for the performance of the church's rites and ceremonies. Moreover, architectural forms and building materials can be used to establish relationships with other buildings in other places and other times. Coordinated systems of signs, symbols, and images proclaim beliefs and doctrine, and in a wider sense carry extended narratives of the people and their faith.Looking at the history of the church through its buildings allows us to establish a tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history, and perhaps even a degree of intimacy with them. Standing in the same place where the worshippers of the past preached and taught, or in a space they built as a memorial, touching the stone they placed, or marking their final resting-place, holding a keepsake they treasured or seeing a relic they venerated, probably comes as close to a shared experience with these people as it is possible to come. Perhaps for a fleeting moment at such times their faces may come more clearly into focus…

This is a comprehensive study of a major figure of the modern movement, in whose work philosophy, architecture and painting are inextricably entwined. From the founding of the periodical De Stijl in 1917, van Doesburg occupied a central position in the development of a Modernist aesthetic. His early career was concentrated on poetry and painting, but from the inception of De Stijl and his association with painters and architects such as Piet Mondrian and J. J. P. Oud, he turned increasingly to architecture as the locus for the accomplishment of the 'total work of art'. Van Doesburg became an architectural theorist of international renown, but encountered disappointment at every turn in his architectural practice. Projects and buildings became object-lessons in the fundamental principles of architecture; theory was shown to be a necessary concomitant to practice. Van Doesburg's extreme polemic guaranteed controversy and conflict so intense that it is still fresh in the minds of his surviving collaborators and correspondents. As the flint to the steel of architects like Gropius and Le Corbusier, as a painter and architect, and as the editor of De Stijl, he was a key figure in the growth of Modernism.

In this book Allan Doig explores the interrelationship of liturgy and architecture from the Early Church to the close of the Middle Ages, taking into account social, economic, technical, theological and artistic factors. These are crucial to a proper understanding of ecclesiastical architecture of all periods, and together their study illuminates the study of liturgy. Buildings and their archaeology are standing indices of human activity, and the whole matrix of meaning they present is highly revealing of the larger meaning of ritual performance within, and movement through, their space. The excavation of the mid-third-century church at Dura Europos in the Syrian desert, the grandeur of Constantine's Imperial basilicas, the influence of the great pilgrimage sites, and the marvels of soaring Gothic cathedrals, all come alive in a new way when the space is animated by the liturgy for which they were built. Reviewing the most recent research in the area, and moving the debate forward, this study will be useful to liturgists, clergy, theologians, art and architectural historians, and those interested in the conservation of ecclesiastical structures built for the liturgy.