Professor Bill Carswell’s architecture students weren’t asked to ponder the unique challenges of designing sacred space.

Their assignment was simply to build a model of a familiar type of building that incorporates a few standard features, such as a gathering space, sanctuary, changing rooms, etc.

But Steve Padget, an associate professor in Kansas University’s School of Architecture and a registered architect, has spent years researching “sacred geometry” — a subdiscipline of his field that specifically looks at the making of sacred space.

He explained overall the impression that architects typically strive to create when designing a church or chapel.

“At a symbolic level, it always has to do with bringing many parts into focus, so that there is a focus on unity. In a way, that could be said of any architecture, but it is particularly true of any sacred space — that the users of the space are to be aware of one source,” said Padget, who has taught at KU since 1978.

Some of the elements that architects often employ in church design, he said, are soaring ceilings, exposed structure (such as roof trusses) and the filtering or other manipulation of sunlight.

“The use of verticality in whatever form, the drawing of the eye upward — that, coupled with bringing in light in a very directed or articulated way, is a common device in order to attempt to transcend the ordinary,” Padget said.

KU architecture students design models of sacred space (12-04-04) Photo Gallery: Hypothetical chapels by KU architecture students

In church design, he added, “You are more aware of something bigger than you.”