Posted on 06/06/2019 7:25:58 PM PDT by marshmallow
In a part of America that is rich with historic Orthodox churches, a new one, faithful to the local architectural tradition, is now under construction.
In the spring of 2018 I travelled to Spruce Island, where St. Herman of Alaska lived from 1808 until his death in 1837. I had come to design a new chapel for Saint Michael’s Skete. This small monastic brotherhood (a dependency of the monastery at Platina in California) occupies a remote site high up a mountainside. Founded in 1983, the skete has several monastic buildings able to host a handful of monks and summer visitors, but only a tiny house chapel. Fr. Andrew (Wermuth), the superior, felt that the time had come to build a large freestanding chapel.
This project presented two challenges for me, which I do not normally encounter when designing Orthodox churches in America. One is the difficulty of access for construction. Materials can be brought in only by boat, and then hauled up the mountainside with great difficulty. So the church would have to be built entirely of wood (even the foundation), and most of the wood would need to be milled on site from the abundant spruce trees.
The other difficulty was how to connect with the local history and traditions of Russian church building, while also differentiating it from any of the nearby historic churches. The historic churches of Alaska are a great cultural treasure, and provide a wonderful basis for design. But many of them are quite similar looking, and the monks were keen to have their new church be recognizable – something a bit different from the others.
There are two historic churches on Spruce Island: the Church of Sts. Sergius and Herman of Valaam, built in 1895, over the grave of St. Herman; and......
(Excerpt) Read more at orthodoxartsjournal.org ...
Very interesting
Only in Alaska would you need a room for firewood storage.
*possible ping of interest*
Thank you for the ping!
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