At the age of 20, fed up with the life at court, Ivan Rilski moved into a cave in a remote part of Bulgaria to do penance. His reputation for sanctity attracted many disciples, who built a hermitage a short distance southeast of the present monastery. Here, the saint’s tomb can still be seen, together with his cell and a chapel dedicated to St. Luke. (more…)

Bernard Maybeck viewed the architectural canon as a style smorgasbord. Gothic, Romanesque, Asian, Arts and Crafts, Classicism – all were there to be sampled, interpreted, and reintroduce as California Craftsman. His belief in pure materials – untreated redwood shingles, exposed reinforced concrete, raw timber trellises – was balanced by unbridled curiosity for new materials, colours, and patterns combined in untested ways. (more…)

Victor Hugo called it ‘a majestic pyramid standing on a huge rock, shaped and carved by the Middle Ages’. Pre-Christian legends held that it was the island where the souls of the dead congregated. But for Aubert, Bishop of nearby Avranches in the 8th century, the rocky crag off France’s northern coast was a place to meditate. (more…)

Known locally as Burt Chapel, St. Aengus’s Church stands at the head of Lough Swilly, 10 kilometres west of Derry. The church dramatically echoes the Grianan of Aileanc, a Bronze-Age hilltop fort that dominates the surrounding countryside, and it is similarly circular in plan. A tent-like roof rising to a conical spire, both clad in copper, tops two concentric circles faced in rough-hewn stone. A split in the two circles forms the entrance; the space inside houses confessional boxes and a sacristy. (more…)

A type of church building in Christianity. It gets its name because it contains the cathedra or “chair” of the bishop. (more…)

The Chapel of St. Ignatius serves the Catholic Jesuit community of the University of Seattle and is therefore designed to meet their religious requirements. It has a rectangular floor plan, whose first roof – from which all the others start – is a basic horizontal plane which gives rise to a prism whose subsequent changes define each of the dimensions of the chapel. (more…)