The term “church” refers both to the Christian congregational body and to the buildings in which public Christian worship takes place. Although churches share with secular sites functional attributes common to all types of built structures, they also are endowed with symbolic meanings consonant with their purpose as sites of sacred ritual. Because international modernism, which dominated the middle years of the 20th century, was selfreferential, antiemblematic, and ahistorical in character, its practitioners sought new ways to express sacredness using space and light, with traditional forms reduced to subtle references. Since the 1960s, however, symbolism has been recognized as implicit in all architecture, countering the tendency Pier Luigi Nervi saw to “reduce the ‘house of God’s people’ to a cold compound of human functions” (Bozzo, 1990). Representations of sacredness respond to a number of different factors, including ritual practice and conventional signification. Many forms are ...