Esoteric Thought, Interfaith Space, and the MIT Chapel: How Architecture Redefined Spirituality and Fostered Cooperation across Religious Traditions

This paper asks why Eero Saarinen, in designing the MIT Chapel (1955), was successful in creating an interfaith chapel that diverse groups found welcoming when earlier attempts to do so had failed.  It asserts that Eero’s success was due to his architectural articulation of Theosophical and Transcendental ideas that emphasized spirituality’s universal character and accessibility through nature-based experience.  Eero absorbed these ideas from his father Eliel Saarinen, who wrote about Theosophical and Transcendental ideas and incorporated them into his design for Christ Church Lutheran (1949) in Minneapolis.  Features of these iconic buildings were imitated by congregations across the U.S., thus normalizing the universalist aesthetic of nature-based spirituality embedded in their design.  Exploring this material evidence of the integration of esoteric ideas about nature-based spirituality into American religion and society, this paper demonstrates the efficacy of religious architecture as a methodological starting point for studying esoteric religion and nature-based spirituality.