Our Next Program - Thursday, December 12, 2019 at ​10:00AM                              
 Peoria Riverfront Museum, 222 SW Washington St., Peoria, IL 61602

         

FORM SHIFTERS, ONE PURPOSE:
BUILT FOR WORSHIP

by Dr. Rolf Achilles, Independent Art Historian

While specific beliefs may remain constant for many generations, the buildings created to house that devotion shape-shift repeatedly. Our perception of the ideal Western, pre-Protestant, Northern European place of worship is some variant of the great French or English Gothic cathedrals. This still-current vision is mostly a 19th-century notion that did not then nor now hold true. Rolf Achilles will look at several common and not so common forms from the almost anti-sacred spaces of the Hagia Sophia (sublime grandeur) to Ronchamp (intimately challenging), from Notre Dame (seen by many as the ideal symbolic space) to the Crystal Cathedral (perhaps transparently symbolic of a new ideal).                          
            Achilles is instructor of the History of American Interior Design in the Historic Preservation graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 
He has written several books and currently sits on the boards of the Richard H. Driehaus Museum and the Glessner House Museum.