"Magical" Places

The rarest of places make you feel close to "God." The trad architecture accounts, I hate to say, sorta have a point.

There’s a place near where my mom lives in Toledo that is one of my favorite places in the world. It is a tiny chapel at Lourdes University, a small catholic college and convent tucked away in the suburb of Sylvania outside Toledo, Ohio.

On its grounds, and open to the public, is a replica of Portiuncula Chapel that Saint Francis lived in in Assisi, Italy in the 12th Century. The chapel is in the woods, meant to be accessed by foot. And you aren’t supposed to talk there. You are supposed to observe a code of silence.

I’m not religious. But I can’t help it, places like this make me feel… something. I love to visit. It is sorta what I imagine it would be like stepping back in time. On the walls are all these sacred objects collected from all over the world.

Sitting in the chapel, there’s always a bible open to a specific text and I like to see what they (the nuns who live there I assume) have chosen. It makes me feel connected with the generations who came before me. My family, our ethnicity etc. we were always very assimilationist. So I don’t have a lot of those traditions that bring about a continuum in my life and try to impart ancient wisdom. But I guess sometimes I crave that kind of thing anyway. Life is confusing. We lack, I think, a little places that make us feel grounded to something bigger than ourselves.

Catholics, I have a lot of issues with certain things about the church (which my family comes from) but one thing you really have to give them credit for, at least compared to protestant denominations especially: Catholics really know how to create a “sacred space.”

As far as "sacred” or magical places (as I like to think of them), this particular college is full of them. It’s rare to encounter this kind of institution now. They seem to be wholly preoccupied with values other than profit, like beauty and history. They have an art curator, because the college is full of art work, much of it created by nuns that live there apparently.

My mom and I had the chance to walk around the grounds a little bit and it was so refreshing to be in a place like that. Here is an example of their artwork and design.

The Catholic Church has created so many beautiful places. I’m not a trad architecture account that is all scold-y about how modern architecture is evil or reflects a spiritual rot in us or something. I like modern architecture! I recognize that the relationship between the workers who built these places and the church might have been a little bit exploitative etc. My dad is a builder and he often remarks when he sees old buildings with elaborate masonry, for example, how those kinds of skilled tradesmen barely even exist anymore. The cost, he says, would be astronomical.

Still, I get that people feel a sense of loss for when public buildings were made with that kind of artistry, like a gift to future generations. When I get a chance to walk into a little catholic parish now, I almost always do, just to admire the iconography, which I have always loved. Lately when I stop, I like to light a candle, if they offer them. I take the opportunity to “pray” a little or just reflect on someone in my life who I am thinking about. I love that ritual. Modern life is lacking those kinds of sacred rituals.

In one I visited recently, there was a marble plaque on a wall recognizing the parishioners whose labor help build and preserve the church. I thought that was cool.

In older cities like Cleveland and Toledo, we are lucky to live with the legacy of those workers artistry. Obviously, contra weird anonymous “trad” Twitter accounts, I agree we can’t be spending infinity dollars on every public or quasi public building we built anymore. I find it annoying when everyone becomes an architecture critic every time a new apartment building is proposed. They want it to be both a monument to the community and absurdly affordable. There’s a tension there. And also between the treatment and pay of those in the construction trades. But still.

I don’t think a place has to be religious to be “magical,” to give people that feeling of wonder and awe necessarily. I do think it does take artists or craftspeople that aren’t too concerned about profitability. I think it also helps to have a connection with something spiritual, but it doesn’t have to be religion.

Another example that comes to mind for me is one of the most famous buildings in the world.