All Spaces Are Sacred

All Spaces Are Sacred

I sense a space with my entire body. We all do.

Before thought arrives, before language, there is a tug on the soul. The space is speaking. Most people feel it and move on. I have spent a lifetime learning to listen. And what I have heard has moved me to both joy and sadness in equal measure.

A space is sacred not because of what it was built for, but because of what it makes possible. The feeling of being somewhere that knows you arrived.

If we leave a space with our soul unchanged, the space has not been designed properly. And that breaks my heart.

A parking garage can bring as much healing as a cathedral. For the right person, at the right moment, emptiness is enough. A drab concrete structure with two inch glass tiles catching light evokes mystery and longing. An empty garage with nothing but reverb and silence can sing like a cathedral at evening prayer. It demands nothing, and in that space, gives everything. It invites you to write your own story.

Then there is your mother's home. The moment you cross that threshold every sense wakes. The warmth finds you before you've removed your coat. The smell is memory itself. It demands nothing. It simply wraps you in love.

One empties you. The other fills you. Both heal.

Any space holds this potential. That is what it means to say all spaces are sacred. And yet so few of them know it.

We receive this potential through the body. Before the mind has a chance to decide how it feels, the body is already answering. It does this through five ancient instruments, each one a doorway into the space, each one contributing its part to a single question: does this place know I am here?

Skin

The body knows before the mind does. Temperature and humidity arrive the moment we cross a threshold, telling us instantly whether a space is alive and cared for. Whether it breathes.

A warm perfectly humidified room in winter says something entirely different than a cool damp space in the height of summer. The body reads both against what it carried in from outside. This is the first greeting. And it is felt before a single conscious thought forms.

When a space gets this wrong, the body knows immediately. Something tightens. Something withdraws. The soul, sensing it is not welcome, pulls back before you have even removed your coat.

Eye

Then the eye begins its work. Light sets the entire mood of a space. But it is not about brightness or darkness. It is about context.

A dark speakeasy with warm lamps invokes something entirely different than a brightly lit library. Both are correct. Both are speaking. The question is whether the light is telling the right story for the right gathering.

Light and form are inseparable. One reveals the other. Shape speaks silently, directly to the soul, before the mind has named what it sees.

Frank Lloyd Wright wraps you in earth and horizon, his spaces pressing low before releasing into something vast and breathing. Zaha Hadid moves around you, her fluid curves dissolving the boundary between structure and motion. Mies van der Rohe strips everything away, leaving only glass, steel and silence. Tadao Ando works with raw concrete and light itself, building spaces that feel ancient and sacred before you understand why.

Not because of style, but because of intention. As Frank Lloyd Wright said, "the space within becomes the reality of the building."

This is what the eye receives. And it arrives in an instant. When it is wrong, you feel that too. A flatness. A kind of visual silence that speaks of nothing and no one.

Ear

But of all the senses, none reaches deeper than sound.

Sound is the most invisible element of design and the most powerful. Most people never hear it directly. They simply feel its presence or its absence, its rightness or its wrongness, without knowing why. They leave a space feeling unsettled and blame the food, the conversation, the company. They linger somewhere longer than they intended and cannot explain what held them.

It was the sound.

Leonard Bernstein understood this when he wrote that music "can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." Sound in a well designed space does the same.

Bad sound unsettles. It creates a restlessness the body feels but the mind cannot name. People leave spaces feeling vaguely wrong and never understand why. I have walked into spaces where the sound alone made me sad. Not because it was loud or discordant, but because it was indifferent. Nobody had listened. Nobody had cared enough to ask what this space should sound like, what it should feel like, what it owed the people inside it.

Good sound does something extraordinary. It is additive, uplifting, the invisible hand that elevates everything around it. In a restaurant it deepens conversation. In a concert hall it becomes the music itself. In a sacred space it amplifies the silence between prayers. It holds rest and warmth and peace and energy all at once. It makes you feel, without knowing why, that everything is exactly as it should be.

This is why intentional audio design is not a luxury. It is a responsibility. The ear is always listening, even when we are not.

Soul

When skin, eye and ear have all been honored, something beyond the physical becomes possible.

Newton, Einstein and Tesla each arrived at the same truth through different doors. Everything vibrates. Every atom, every surface, every silence between notes. The human soul is no different. It is a receiver, extraordinarily sensitive, tuned by a lifetime of experience to read the frequency of every space it enters.

When a space is right, we vibrate with it. We leave elevated, in resonance with something larger than ourselves. We leave, in the truest sense of the word, healed.

This is what I have spent my life chasing. Not perfection. Not recognition. The moment when a space does what it was always capable of doing, and a person leaves it changed.

Great design is transcendent. Its highest calling should be to feed the soul.

Harmony

This is what it means for a space to be in harmony with itself and with those who inhabit it.

Not a matter of style. A classical space and a boldly modern one can both move the heart and mind with equal force. What they share, when they work, is attentiveness and intention. The space greets each person where they are, offering what they need in that moment.

When harmony is absent you feel its ghost. The space that almost worked. The room that tried and fell short. That absence is its own kind of sadness, because the potential was always there, waiting to be honored.

Love

And beneath harmony, beneath intention, beneath every decision of light and material and sound, there is an ingredient that no specification sheet captures and no budget line contains.

You cannot name it when you feel it. But you know it the moment you arrive. It is the same quality you taste in a meal prepared with love, the same warmth you feel in a room that has been tended with care.

I have felt it in the most unexpected places. And I have felt its absence in spaces that should have had it and didn't. That absence is the saddest thing in design. A beautiful room with no love in it is like a song played perfectly with no feeling. Technically correct. Spiritually empty.

This is the unseen ingredient. And it is felt by everyone who enters.

The Designer's Responsibility

Tadao Ando, one of the great architects of our time, put it simply: "I want to create a space that moves people. It doesn't matter if it is a house, or a museum, or whatever."

Before the first line is drawn, four questions deserve an answer.

How will this make the person entering feel? How does this space convey love? How do we honor humanity in our design? And when they leave, what will they remember?

These are not soft questions. They are the hardest questions in design, and the most important. Every material, every proportion, every choice of light and sound exists in service of the answers.

Without them we build structures instead of spaces. We solve problems instead of honoring people. The work gets done, the project gets delivered, and nobody is changed by any of it. The risk is not failure. It is invisibility. Spaces that process people rather than receive them. Buildings that stand for decades without ever making a soul feel welcomed, moved, or alive.

The work itself can cause us to forget why we do it in the first place. The deadlines, the budgets, the compromises, the clients who cannot see what you see. In the noise of it all, something essential gets lost.

It is the humanity of our work that matters far more than we often understand.

Thomas Merton, a monk who spent his life in contemplation, had his most profound revelation not in a cathedral but on a street corner in Louisville, Kentucky. Standing among strangers in the ordinary noise of a city, he wrote: "The gate of heaven is everywhere."

Meaning can be found in the most mundane moment or the most sacred space. This is the heart of everything. Every act of craft, every creative decision, every space we bring into being. All of it should be in the service of this single truth.

If every space resonated love, our world would be healed.