“Sublime Flesh: Architectural Experiments for Sacred and Sublime Spaces” brings together, for the first time, new designs for contemporary spiritual spaces developed by students at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. A collection of research projects located in international cities including Istanbul, Rome, Turin, Lisbon, Havana and Miami, each explores a unique sense of sacredness and the Sublime. The complex nature of these themes is articulated in a series of exquisite models that express a new ornamental, spatial and technological approach and also a reconsidered religious and cultural dimension for contemporary architecture design.

If your not able to make it to London for this show a number of the architects featured also appear in Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands including co-author Sara Shafiei, Marjan Colletti, Marcos Cruz, Johan Voordouw, Kenny Tsui and Tobias Klien. For those who can come. It opens tonight and runs till April 11th.

Kenny Tsui, Veiled Voids – Chapel Extension at the Basilica of St. Clemente, Rome 2007

Sacred Spaces have long been the apotheosis of architectural genius; buildings created by some of the greatest names in architectural history in which stylistic and spatial innovations are revealed and new technologies tested and developed. The theory and theology of Sacred Spaces holds renewed interest in the current historic moment where religious faith is under intense scrutiny. Sublime Spaces are primarily associated with experience bound up in the powers of nature, but as nature has changed throughout the ages, so has our sense of the Sublime. Expressing grand passions and utopian ideas, Sublime Spaces illuminate the emotional involvement between the creator and the user of architecture spaces.

Vicky Patsalis, Arcade for Sacred Relicts at the Museum of Anatomy, Turin 2009

Housed in the Nave of Christ Church Spitalfields and displaying designs for churches, mosques and other spiritual spaces, the exhibition will offer a direct dialogue between historic and contemporary theology, theory and practice. The exhibition will be accompanied by a symposium in which key architects, historians and critics discuss contemporary architecture in the context of the exhibition. Speakers are Sir Peter Cook, Marjan Colletti, Rev Rod Green, Robert Harbison, Ali Mangera, Natasha Sandmeier, Yael Reisner, and Marcos Cruz (chair).

Vicky Patsalis, Arcade for Sacred Relicts at the Museum of Anatomy, Turin 2009