The nineteenth-century American building world assembled an unprecedented armature of professional knowledge. This dissertation reconstructs that armature by sampling from the profusion of technical and institutional documents that helped architects, engineers, and builders reckon with the enigmatic abstractions of liberal and industrial capitalism— along with the regimes of labor, infrastructure, and resource management they introduced. Typically ignored by architectural historians, these documents form a valuable archive of cultural texts and evidential indices. As a system of knowledge, they tether design to a series of political-economic conflicts. Revolutionary Philadelphia carpenters and reactionary Anglican specifiers alike found in printed numbers sources of authority and claims on temporal power. Postbellum architect-engineers like John C. Trautwine and Frank Kidder used pocketbooks to transfuse the logics of locomotives and lumber mills into the core of architectural practice. Through a professional sleight of hand, institution-builders like Richard Upjohn and Richard Morris Hunt distanced themselves from the appearance of calculation while depending upon it ever more, encrypting it in drawings, institutional scripts, and legal precedent. In their work with architect H.H. Richardson, general contractors James and Orlando W. Norcross most fully realized the potentials of this system, synthesizing technical literature, industrial capital, and a proprietary mythos of materials to achieve the apotheosis of American architecture. I plumb this obscure world of literate builders and architect-engineers to map such architecture as an expanded field of infrastructural practice, arguing that industrial modernity was perhaps best glimpsed not in an iron frame but in a carefully-sourced palette of quarry-faced sandstone.

The Christian church has been an inherent part of human continuity for more than thousand years. The external appearance of the Christian church has always reflected societal transformations as well as turning points in history. Moreover, it has become an integral part of our existence both in space and time. Nowadays, we frequently hear that the crisis of European society is in effect an identity crisis, an inability to ask about where we are heading and what the meaning of life is. The reduction of time givenness to the already limited scope of our own physical existence destroys the ability in a man to ask questions and find answers to them, or even enquire about the meaning and essence of things. The carefree, dispersed husk blown by the wind may seem to be free and independent; however, it has also stopped trying to actively find paths for future generations. One of the fundamental attributes of an architect should be a strong aptitude for synthetic thinking, which includes multiple knowledge of social cognition, i.e. in the currentness of present experience as well as in time. This knowledge should ideally help to identify the core of problem, and to define the general rules applicable, regardless of changes in social demand, trends or taste. This dissertation, concerned with the “change” of the Christian church, ought to provide a compact, effective platform based on a synthesis of all analytical findings in the areas of architecture, liturgy, history, and theology. This platform can be applied in architectural practice, education (both architectural and theological), pastorage, and other wide, well-researched social discourses on the current form of the Christian sacred space, its basis and likely future development. The emphasis should be put on individual interpretation of a target group rather than dogmatic interpretation of dramatic revelations. Therefore, the first half of the dissertation will analyse the theological and symbolic basis, and historic transformations. Whilst, the second half will depict the current approach to the creation of sacred space in both newly built churches and the ongoing conversions of existing spaces. In conclusion, the dissertation will debate the future direction of sacred space in post-Christian Europe.