Women’s religious communities and patronage in the UK: Two case studies

Kate Jordan

doi:10.17979/aarc.2024.11.11340

Authors

Kate Jordan University of Westminster https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0215-7258

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17979/aarc.2024.11.11340

Keywords:

nuns, convents, monasteries, patronage, sacred architecture

Abstract

This paper discusses women as architectural clients through an examination of Roman Catholic nuns as patrons, designers and in some cases builders of religious architecture. The paper offers two case studies to explore the roles that women assumed in religious communities: the first, a chapel commissioned and built by a community of Carmelite nuns in Wales during the 1950s and the second, a recently completed abbey in the North of England. The examples highlight the evolution of female agency in the built environment and how this has been impacted by the professionalisation of architecture.

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Author Biography

Kate Jordan, University of Westminster

Kate Jordan is a Reader in the School of Architecture and Cities at the University of Westminster, London. She has published widely on modern-era faith architecture with recent publications on contemporary church architecture in the journals Architecture and Culture; Architectural Histories; the Journal of Architecture and the Journal of Architectural Conservation. She contributed a chapter on nineteenth-century Roman Catholic architecture «Building the post-emancipation church» in the recently published Oxford History of Catholicism in Britain and Ireland. She is the co-editor of the volume Architecture for Religious Communities: Building the Kingdom, published by Routledge in 2018 and more recently, guest editor of a special issue of Architecture and Culture, entitled «Spiritual, sacred secular: places of faith in the twenty-first century». She is currently leading a research project funded by the Royal Institute of British Architects, entitled «Moving pictures: reusing cinemas as places of worship in the diaspora».

References

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