Our campus is built around a cathedral. Walk down blocks of healthy palms, stroll along the grassy oval and climb the sandstone steps. Stroll past despairing statues, proud pillars and sloped clay roofs. The architecture compels you forward. You move a little further, up a single step, over checkered tiles and across historic plaques, until finally, you have arrived. Symmetry extends out of sight: every road leads to this beautiful place. The world calls you here to confess, to preach, to testify. Enter Memorial Church.
My first time in the church, I saw stained glass and mosaic tiles depicting Biblical legends and parables. The ground shook as classical Indian dancers stamped across the pulpit; their bells rang loud enough to wake the weeping angels overhead. Underneath the crucifixion, I explained Diwali to my Baptist friend. Adam and Eve gazed at the spectacle on stage. Saris spun to songs by Ed Sheeran and Jason Derulo on the same stage that held Catholic mass a few hours ago. The candles were still lit. Hinduism, Christianity, Indian tradition and Western modernity came together unrecognizably. The Church fell into American syncretism.
America abandoned the cathedral. Religion no longer dictates our architecture. We build skyscrapers and strip malls for consumers and cars. Our cities sprawl. A cathedral doesn’t have to be a church. Old libraries, open fields, capitol buildings, train stations, thick forests and concert halls – certain places strike us as sacred. We have stopped building these sacred places. In a recent interview, Tucker Carlson launched a tirade against a grave threat to our nation: postmodern architecture. He rails against a society built out of cement walls, fluorescent lights, and cubicles. His solution, of course, involves building more churches. At first glance, Carlson’s hatred for modern architecture seems to merely reflect his disdain for liberal atheism. But the core of his argument, when stripped of political direction, remains aesthetic in nature: “Architecture … is the purest expression of the society that produced it. If you live in a place which creates nothing beautiful … that’s a very sick and dark place.” All art, he claims, carries a message or a meaning, whether implicit or explicit. Modern architecture prioritizes profit and efficiency over beauty and form; it sterilizes.
Nobody heard the organ that night. They probably would have kicked us out if they had. A few hours after Diwali had ended, my fingertips sent air rushing through pipes thicker than my waist. The candles had gone out. A chandelier shimmered in the dark. Height usually makes the world look small. Think of the world viewed from a skyscraper – ant-like cars, oblong fields, narrow rivers and pathetic highways. But when I sat behind the monstrous pipe organ, high above the altar, Memorial Church felt even bigger. Maybe this is the intention: skyscrapers remove us from humanity, but churches bring us closer to the divine. Cathedrals inspire awe and the higher we climb, the closer it all feels.
At Stanford, we idolize disruptors, visionaries and innovators. We give sleek buildings names like Huang and Gates; we accelerate particles to near-light speeds; we create intelligence from machines. But at the center of Stanford lies an ancient cathedral, at least by American standards. It hosts Diwali parties and weekly mass — it invites diplomats, pastors, politicians, authors, artists, tourists and students to the stage. Memorial Church is polytheistic in the broadest sense of the word. So where does this leave us, the campus dedicated to change, at once clinging to and rejecting the past?
If all architecture says something, Memorial Church dispels Carlson’s fears. Even as increasingly absurd glass structures shoot up in E-Quad, our center remains a cathedral — a sacred place, not because of the crucifix but because of the organ. It breathes. This is what both Carlson and the Brutalists fail to understand. Although we race against the future, we have not forgotten the past. Buildings are more than walls and furniture, more than parts and labor. A memorial is a monument to something we do not want to forget. We live in a beautiful place.
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