“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust

I first fell in love with churches not as a Christian but as an architect. Despite growing up in church, it wasn’t until my mid-twenties that, as an architecture student, I slowly awoke to the realization that I knew very little about the material things of Christendom. The enormous provenance of church buildings—its art, architecture, and artifacts—felt like a vestige of the past, the domain of art historians and academics. Neither Gothic cathedrals nor bell-topped steeples were accurate to the big box churches of my evangelical adolescence.

It wasn't until architecture school when, surprisingly, I began to learn about the very history of architecture through churches. My first week of architecture school, we were handed a syllabus for a course called “Close Reading and Formal Analysis,” taught by the architect Peter Eisenman. I’ll never forget one particular line:

The most difficult thing for an incoming graduate architecture student is learning what ‘learning how to see’ as an architect is. All graduate students in architecture believe, because of a lifetime of being in and around buildings, that they know what architecture is; they already think they know what their subject is. Therefore, the first activity in this class is one of unlearning.

The class was about “close-reading” buildings from Renaissance and Baroque architecture, studying the churches of Alberti, Brunelleschi, Bramante, Palladio, Bernini, and Borromini. We studied the plans, sections and elevations, drawing diagrams that were analytical in nature, learning a non-representational technique to “see beyond the facts of perception.” Thus began my journey of unlearning. Everything I thought I knew about buildings was riddled with assumptions and blind spots. I had no idea how to “see” as an architect.

In the next few years, additional coursework revealed an entire legacy of modern church buildings–particularly in the 20th century–that further subverted and imploded my conceptions of the church. The architects I encountered were rigorous in their design process—such as Inger and Johannes Exner, Dominikus and Gottfried Bohm, and Rudolf Schwarz—all of whom took an “assume nothing” approach to design buildings that were conversant with history while employing modern materials and construction techniques. I poured over these books, wrote essays about postwar suburban churches, and even successfully convinced my family to visit Columbus, Indiana with me for my birthday one summer, just so we could attend a service in Eero and Eliel Saarinen’s First Christian Church.

After architecture school, I was given the gift of travel. I spent one year in the UK to study the church architecture of Christopher Wren. That year wasn’t just about scholarship, however. It was about continuing to develop “eyes to see.” I took advantage of my proximity to continental Europe to visit the churches I had learned about in school. I made pilgrimage to all kinds of churches, both modern and medieval, often with just a camera and sketchbook in hand. I quickly learned that the beauty of most Catholic churches is that the doors are almost always open midweek. I borrowed a nice Danish couple’s car to visit every Exner church in Denmark. I walked an hour through rural German farmland to visit Peter Zumthor’s Brother Klaus Field Chapel by foot. One afternoon, kind British nuns let me into their chapel just outside Oxford, to sit and marvel over the craftsmanship designed by Niall McLaughlin. That summer, I walked two hundred miles along the northern route of Spain’s Camino de Santiago with my dad, stopping daily into dusty Romanesque churches for pilgrim mass.

My pilgrimage was one of learning through unlearning. I began to develop new “eyes to see” not only the church as a physical building but as a repository of collective hopes and values, evidence of a particular gathering of people in a particular time and in a particular place. My architectural studies that began with Peter Eisenman’s class conceived of architectural form through pure analysis. Over time, while I continue to appreciate the shape of church buildings, I am in pursuit of something more ineffable: how the shape of church buildings reciprocally shapes us. Or in the words of T.S. Eliot: "You are not here to verify, / Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / Or carry report. You are here to kneel / Where prayer has been valid.”

Today, I am haunted by the question posed by Roberta Green Ahmanson: What is the footprint Christianity has left on this earth? My addenda: What is the footprint Christianity will leave for the 21st century? My exhibition, The Architecture of Prayer, emerged from this question, featuring over forty projects designed from 1999 to the present that suggest a flowering in our century of new architectural and art forms. As both an architect and a liturgical consultant, I walk alongside church communities who have decided to commission art and architecture in a serious way. My role is to be a co-pilgrim, to listen and reflect back what I’m hearing from the churches and be a translator between the community and the architects. Ultimately, I believe architecture isn’t purely a matter of head knowledge but also heart formation. Only in seeking new eyes can we learn how to behold.

Amanda Iglesias, AIA is an architect, curator, and liturgical consultant in New York City. She is the curator of "The Architecture of Prayer," an international survey of contemporary church architecture. Amanda’s research and curation via The Iglesias Project seeks to enliven the church’s sense of possibility and architectural imagination. Her writing has been published in Comment Magazine, Christianity Today, the New York Review of Architecture, and Architecture Today.