The
Chapel
Inside the nave of the chapel the alphabet will be seen in reverse. Standing in the sacred space, with huge backward-facing stained glass letters walled around, the visitor will experience a personal alphabetic palette projecting outward from their being. I want the visitor to feel that they are the core of a God-like transcendental projection of their creative force. I see this chapel as being a monument to the imaginative power within all of us.
Seeing letters in reverse is not novel. For more than five hundred years, since the invention of the printing press in 1440, typesetters worked their craft in reverse. Setting movable type, working in reverse, became a natural and necessary skill. During these early years, printing was met with skepticism and fear. I’ve thought a lot about type in reverse and about how an image is produced. When we print an image, the product is a mirror of the typesetters forme.
Da Vinci wrote his notebooks in reverse. He may have written in reverse in homage to the newly established printing arts or possibly as an expression of some transcendental ideas about the projection of thought through the written word.
Somehow, I have it in my head to build this chapel.
The Movie Lilies of the Field, expresses the challenges and hopes I have with the chapel project through the characters of Mother Maria and Homer Smith (Schmit).
Homer looked from the unsightly foundation to the sketch and back again. There was a pile of new lumber behind the barn. “If you think I’m building that you’re out of your mind,” He said. “I’m one man. I ain’t no contractor with crew. I don’t need all that work neither.” He handed the sketch back to her. “No.”
–William Edmund Barrett, Lilies of the Field, 1962
