Religious buildings are interesting design problems. Like religion itself, they may juxtapose the shared beliefs and practices of the collective with the needs of the individual. They can be evocative while allowing for individual reflection. Increasingly they must serve multiple purposes and groups of users within a single, unified structure. They may be places of worship, as well as performance, each use having its own, unique technological requirements for lighting, acoustics, audio/visual systems and even heating and cooling. The technology that allows these uses must be integrated in a way that reinforces, without distraction, the architecture and, thus, the purposes of the structure. It is challenging to reconcile the corporeal with the spiritual in new buildings and can be even more so in existing ones, originally designed for different parameters.
