This essay critiques the rigidity of planning’s approach to religious buildings and argues for a framework that treats people, ritual, and faith as central architectural forces. It suggests that current systems overlook the ethical claims of religious communities and the role of worship sites as anchors of collective memory.
This essay argues that contemporary planning frameworks systematically misrecognise religious buildings by treating them as generic land-use categories rather than as lived, ritual, and communal environments. Evaluation is typically reduced to measurable impacts—traffic, noise, and parking—while the social, spiritual, and mnemonic roles of worship spaces are largely absent from formal guidance. As a result, faith communities such as Jesus House for All the Nations often occupy spaces planners interpret as temporary or inappropriate, even when these sites function as stable centres of collective life.
Using Jesus House—a major London church currently housed in a leased, warehouse-like building—as a case study, the essay explores the tension between external readings of architectural precarity and internal experiences of spiritual permanence. For the congregation, the church’s stability lies not in ownership or typology but in people, ritual, and shared faith. This exposes a mismatch between planning’s material definitions of permanence and religious understandings of belonging.
Positioned from within the congregation and informed by architectural training, the project combines architectural observation, theology, and sociology, drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other and Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory. It argues that planning operates as a totalising system that struggles to recognise forms of spatial life that exceed its categories, while ritual practice can transform “temporary” structures into enduring anchors of identity.
Formally, the essay adopts the speculative guise of an unofficial building regulation document—a proposed “Part F: Faith”. This imagined extension reframes regulation around people, ritual, and ethical responsibility, proposing faith as an architectural force that current systems fail to recognise.
This essay argues that contemporary planning frameworks systematically misrecognise religious buildings by treating them as generic land-use categories rather than as lived, ritual, and communal environments. Evaluation is typically reduced to measurable impacts—traffic, noise, and parking—while the social, spiritual, and mnemonic roles of worship spaces are largely absent from formal guidance. As a result, faith communities such as Jesus House for All the Nations often occupy spaces planners interpret as temporary or inappropriate, even when these sites function as stable centres of collective life.
Using Jesus House—a major London church currently housed in a leased, warehouse-like building—as a case study, the essay explores the tension between external readings of architectural precarity and internal experiences of spiritual permanence. For the congregation, the church’s stability lies not in ownership or typology but in people, ritual, and shared faith. This exposes a mismatch between planning’s material definitions of permanence and religious understandings of belonging.
Positioned from within the congregation and informed by architectural training, the project combines architectural observation, theology, and sociology, drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the Other and Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory. It argues that planning operates as a totalising system that struggles to recognise forms of spatial life that exceed its categories, while ritual practice can transform “temporary” structures into enduring anchors of identity.
Formally, the essay adopts the speculative guise of an unofficial building regulation document—a proposed “Part F: Faith”. This imagined extension reframes regulation around people, ritual, and ethical responsibility, proposing faith as an architectural force that current systems fail to recognise.