Church architecture
Church architecture refers to the architecture of Christian buildings, such as churches, chapels, convents, and seminaries. It has evolved over the two thousand years of the Christian religion, partly by innovation and partly by borrowing other architectural styles as well as responding to changing beliefs, practices and local traditions. From the Early Christianity to the present, the most significant objects of transformation for Christian architecture and design were the great churches of Byzantium, the Romanesque abbey churches, Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance basilicas with its emphasis on harmony. These large, often ornate and architecturally prestigious buildings were dominant features of the towns and countryside in which they stood. However, far more numerous were the parish churches in Christendom, the focus of Christian devotion in every town and village. While a few are counted as sublime works of architecture to equal the great cathedrals and churches, the majority developed along simpler lines, showing great regional diversity and often demonstrating local vernacular technology and decoration.
Buildings were at first from those originally intended for other purposes but, with the rise of distinctively ecclesiastical architecture, church buildings came to influence secular ones which have often imitated religious architecture. In the 20th century, the use of new materials, such as steel and concrete, has had an effect upon the design of churches.
The history of church architecture divides itself into periods, and into countries or regions and by religious affiliation. The matter is complicated by the fact that buildings put up for one purpose may have been re-used for another, that new building techniques may permit changes in style and size, that changes in liturgical practice may result in the alteration of existing buildings and that a building built by one religious group may be used by a successor group with different purposes.
Origins and development of the church building
The simplest church building comprises a single meeting space, built of locally available material and using the same skills of construction as the local domestic buildings. Such churches are generally rectangular, but in African countries where circular dwellings are the norm, vernacular churches may be circular as well. A simple church may be built of mud brick, wattle and daub, split logs or rubble. It may be roofed with thatch, shingles, corrugated iron or banana leaves. However, church congregations, from the 4th century onwards, have sought to construct church buildings that were both permanent and aesthetically pleasing. This had led to a tradition in which congregations and local leaders have invested time, money and personal prestige into the building and decoration of churches.Within any parish, the local church is often the oldest building and is larger than any pre-19th-century structure except perhaps a barn. The church is often built of the most durable material available, often dressed stone or brick. The requirements of liturgy have generally demanded that the church should extend beyond a single meeting room to two main spaces, one for the congregation and one in which the priest performs the rituals of the Mass. To the two-room structure is often added aisles, a tower, chapels, and vestries and sometimes transepts and mortuary chapels. The additional chambers may be part of the original plan, but in the case of a great many old churches, the building has been extended piecemeal, its various parts testifying to its long architectural history.
Beginnings
In the first three centuries of the Early Livia Christian Church, the practice of Christianity was illegal and few churches were constructed. In the beginning, Christians worshipped along with Jews in synagogues and in private houses. After the separation of Jews and Christians, the latter continued to worship in people's houses, known as house churches. These were often the homes of the wealthier members of the faith. Saint Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians writes: "The churches of Asia send greetings. Aquila and Prisca, together with the church in their house, greet you warmly in the Lord."Some domestic buildings were adapted to function as churches. One of the earliest of adapted residences is at Dura Europos church, built shortly after 200 AD, where two rooms were made into one, by removing a wall, and a dais was set up. To the right of the entrance a small room was made into a baptistry.
Some church buildings were specifically built as church assemblies, such as that opposite the emperor Diocletian's palace in Nicomedia. Its destruction was recorded thus:
When that day dawned, in the eighth consulship of Diocletian and seventh of Maximian, suddenly, while it was yet hardly light, the prefect, together with chief commanders, tribunes, and officers of the treasury, came to the church in Nicomedia, and the gates having been forced open, they searched everywhere for an idol of the Divinity. The books of the Holy Scriptures were found, and they were committed to the flames; the utensils and furniture of the church were abandoned to pillage: all was rapine, confusion, tumult. That church, situated on rising ground, was within view of the palace; and Diocletian and Galerius stood as if on a watchtower, disputing long whether it ought to be set on fire. The sentiment of Diocletian prevailed, who dreaded lest, so great a fire being once kindled, some part of the city might he burnt; for there were many and large buildings that surrounded the church. Then the Pretorian Guards came in battle array, with axes and other iron instruments, and having been let loose everywhere, they in a few hours leveled that very lofty edifice with the ground.
From house church to church
From the first to the early fourth centuries most Christian communities worshipped in private homes, often secretly. Some Roman churches, such as the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome, are built directly over the houses where early Christians worshipped. Other early Roman churches are built on the sites of Christian martyrdom or at the entrance to catacombs where Christians were buried.With the victory of the Roman emperor Constantine at the Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312 AD, Christianity became a lawful and then the privileged religion of the Roman Empire. The faith, already spread around the Mediterranean, now expressed itself in buildings. Christian architecture was designed to correspond to the civic and imperial forms of ancient Roman architecture, because the architects and building craftsmen mastered these forms. The Aula regia, the typical audience hall of imperial palaces with a throne apse, became the model for aisleless churches, whereas the Basilica building type, with a higher central nave flanked by two or more lower longitudinal aisles, commonly used for market halls in the Roman era, became the most widespread building type for churches in the East and West, sometimes with galleries and clerestories. While civic basilicas mostly had no apses, or sometimes apses at either end, the Christian basilica usually had a single apse where the bishop and presbyters sat in a dais behind the altar. While pagan basilicas had as their focus a statue of the emperor, Christian basilicas focused on the altar as place of the Eucharist. Central buildings, often modeled on Roman official buildings, with circular, oval, square, cruciform, hexagonal, octagonal, nonagonal or higher polygonal building shapes, also served as models, for example for the 6th century Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna. The Roman temple, on the other hand, was only suitable as a design for smaller chapels, as it only had a small cella inside, to which only the priests had access, but not the congregation, as in Christian churches.
The first very large Christian churches were built in Rome in the early 4th century: Old St. Peter's Basilica, Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore, and in the early 5th century Santa Sabina.
In Ravenna, the temporary ruler's residence shortly before and after the fall of the Roman Empire, many early Christian churches were not only newly built but have also been preserved to this day: In the 5th century the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and the Baptistery of Neon were built and in the 6th century the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, Basilica of San Vitale, the Arian Baptistery and the Archbishop's Chapel.
In addition to such new church buildings, a number of ancient temples or civil buildings were later converted into churches, especially after the fall of the Roman Empire, for instance the Pantheon, Rome, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Rome, Sant'Adriano al Foro, Rome, the Mausoleum of Constantina, Rome, Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome, Santa Balbina, Rome, the Cathedral of Syracuse, the Temple of Minerva, Assisi, the Maison carrée in Nîmes, France, the Baptistère Saint-Jean in Poitiers, France.
The early churches distinguished themselves from pagan temples by the simplicity in their execution; a lot of brickwork and little marble, no plastic arts, no “moving” scenes. The glass mosaics were suggestive but made of comparatively cheap material. Depictions of saints like those in Ravenna were deliberately not lifelike, but rather “disembodied”. The outer walls were only lightened up by the partially large windows. It was only later that the upper part of the facade was decorated with mosaics. In much later eras were these basilicas more richly decorated, with magnificent Renaissance ceilings and marble walls, pompous statues and stucco, such as the still standing Roman ones, Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, San Giovanni in Laterano, Santa Maria Maggiore. The Ravenna Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe still gives a relatively authentic impression, with the original columns, mosaics and the open beamed ceiling as well as the exterior.