The Architect Designing Sacred Spaces for the Every Day

It’s an approach that, this year, earned McLaughlin the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Gold Medal, its highest honour and one that has previously gone to the likes of Zaha Hadid, IM Pei, Lesley Lokko, Frank Gehry, Balkrishna Doshi, Norman Foster, Le Corbusier, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The accolade is considered something of a lifetime achievement award, but McLaughlin is very much in the thick of his career—with significant projects including a museum in Jordan on the site of where Jesus was baptised (due to complete in 2030) and a cathedral in Sydney announced earlier this year. These projects are characteristic of his body of work, which begins with a deep interest in ritual, craft, and community. Many are religious buildings and, if not, spaces for other communal experiences—from Oxford and Cambridge colleges (his library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, won him the 2022 Stirling Prize) to cancer and Alzheimer’s care centers.

He sees them as a continuum. “Whether it’s a building for a faith group, a café, a community centre, or a place of learning or work—they all have their own calendars, seasons, and clothes.” He points to a football match as an example of how rituals are fundamental. “Most British people don’t attend formal religious services on a Sunday, but during the weekend, they’re involved in forms of activity that are very like it.” In these contexts, he believes architecture is performing a sacred role.

In his mind, this role differs from the one established in the twentieth century, when progress meant modernization, industrialization, growth, and the production of unique artifacts by named authors. Today’s challenges call for a new paradigm. – one that faces up to the shifting role of architects amid a changing construction sector, the ecological crisis, and the reshaping of work by artificial intelligence. While McLaughlin names Mies van der Rohe as an influence, he recognises that 20^th century modernism has driven many ordinary people to feel alienated from contemporary architecture, seeing it “as a private aesthetic run by an elite.”

For McLaughlin, this requires a robust response—a return to something older. “Rather than producing buildings as high-tech products, there’s an ancient idea of construction as an activity in itself whose purpose was to bind communities together.” This was at the heart of a 2013 project: a chapel in Oxford for a theological college that had merged with an elderly order of nuns on the other side of the city. “The students would care for the sisters, and the sisters … brought the new chapel as a gift,” he says. The architecture took inspiration from a nearby clearing of trees—a metaphor for a meeting place—and the shape of a ship to suggest a uplifting sense of buoyancy.