Transitioning Natures: Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Experiment

Antonio Petrov

doi:10.6092/issn.2036-1602/6310

Authors

Antonio Petrov University of Texas San Antonio
Received his doctoral degree in the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, and cultural studies from Harvard University. He is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio. He is co-founder of the Harvard GSD publication New Geographies, founder and editor-in-chief of DOMA. In the past two years he also served as co-program director of the Expander at Archeworks in Chicago and Caudill visiting critic at Rice University. He recently published in MONU, Manifest, MAS-Context, edited New Geographies Volume 5 “The Mediterranean: Worlds, Regions, Cities, and Architectures,” and a new volume of Archeworks Papers. He taught at Rice University, Harvard University, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Iowa State University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-1602/6310

Keywords:

Human Territoriality, Sacred Geographies, Third Nature, Superordinary, Drive-in Church, Retailing Religion, Robert Schuller, Richard Neutra

Abstract

Through the lens of Evangelist Reverend Robert H. Schuller’s Garden Grove drive-in walk-in church, this paper aims to exemplify how his architecture has transcended existing geographies that have long been anchored by the epistemology of what can be referred to as traditional “religious” architecture. This paper examines how Schuller instrumentalized broader imbrications of political contexts to change or manipulate the traditional religious subject. It also presents how Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove experiment reconceptualized “territory” as an evolving ideological dimension; not as a trajectory, or as transitory space, but as inhabitable third nature. My analysis challenges established readings of religious architecture as being interiorized manifestations. To do so, it poses the following questions: how does this meta-geographical dimension shed new light on questions of (traditional) architectural aesthetics in Protestant architecture? What spaces and politics does it produce? Does the third nature have a history of its own?

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