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Empowerment through place: The chapel at Concord Academy as participatory architecture, education, and experience
Abstract
This critical case study explores multiple meanings of a small chapel at Concord Academy, a private secondary school in Massachusetts. The relationship between participation and empowerment is explored, as revealed through the chapel and as understood, experienced, and articulated by people involved with the chapel over time. Architecture is considered as a vehicle for democracy--an opportunity for risk, interaction, community, and encounter. Found abandoned in the 1950s, the chapel was rescued by Concord Academy women, girls, and a few men who took the building down, reassembled and refurbished it at Concord, and built huge architectural carvings, pulpit, altar, and steeple. Seniors and faculty soon addressed the school in morning "chapels," which evolved into a "central rite of passage" for students--pivotal, powerful "Who am I?" experiences described as "saying hello to adulthood and good-bye to childhood." The chapel is explored as building project, rite of passage, evolving drama, and forum for community. Questions include what is empowerment and what makes environments empowering, experientially, pedagogically, institutionally and architecturally? What does the chapel mean to those those who know and use it? Issues include: the relationship between individuality and community; what makes places meaningful; the chapel in relation to women; finding and speaking one's own voice; the separation of learning from doing; and intersections of gender, class, race and sexual orientation. Empowerment is considered both as individual self-confidence and efficacy and sociopolitical consciousness and intervention. This study also explores alternative, participatory ways of conducting research and writing a dissertation--more a weaving of stories and an evolving saga than a removed, academic treatise. For me this has been an odyssey, challenging and inviting us to be engaged as full human beings, not just thinkers. Qualitative, ethnographic, phenomenological, and participatory, this study uses interview/dialogues, participation, photography, and interaction as opportunities for participants' increasing involvement, control, and appropriation. The project should interest the public, educators, architects, environmental designers, historians, anthropologists, community activists, and participatory/action researchers. This study is not simply rational. I hope my heart, C.A.'s heart, and the rhythm of the chapel's steady pulse come through.
Subject Area
Educational sociology|Secondary education|Architecture
Recommended Citation
Fisk, Daria Bolton, "Empowerment through place: The chapel at Concord Academy as participatory architecture, education, and experience" (1996). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI9638957.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI9638957