Shadows of a Sacred Space: Baptist Temple to Concert Hall @ Temple U

This article, "Shadows of a Sacred Space," by Lawrence Biemiller from The Chronicle of Higher Education, is subtitled "As Temple University converts a landmark Baptist church into a concert hall, its interior fittings, including carvings and stencils, will be lost." Access may require registration or subscriber password. You should be able to view and listen to this narrated slide show by Lawrence without any registration or password.

[The project] will gut the Temple's interior. That's partly because it's so far gone now, after years of leaks and other indignities, that it cannot be saved, and partly because a first-rate contemporary concert facility could not be built any other way. The carved and paneled choir loft that rises behind the pulpit and under the ranks of organ pipes, the baptistry that was the focus of Conwell's most theatrical serv­ices, the spacious wooden balconies suspended on thin metal rods so no one's view was blocked — all that will be lost, along with the ceiling stencils, Conwell's office, and the basement kitchen, with baking pans still stacked in the oven of a huge, rusting, iron range.