Advent and Architects

Finally we are underway, after more than six years of work we are talking with the architects for our new build. Check out the Skainos website for details of our contribution to the urban regeneration of inner east Belfast.

This week two architects met the key staff at EBM to begin the process of detailed scheme design. It was a fascinating day of rolling meetings. Every sixty minutes a new team engaged on their area of interest, from homelessness and the proposed new hostel, to the new training and support suite for those seeking work, to new youth work provision, and new worship space. Each team brought their own interests and aspirations to bear in an effort to inform the architects of what is required.

It was also interesting to observe the people involved and how they work and think. Some jumped directly to details, like ceiling heights and distances between. Others were aspirational and spoke of what they hoped to do and be in their new space.

Hanging around with architects though is great, and quite appropriate in this season of the church year.

What we were trying to encourage the staff team to do was to verbalise their hopes and aspirations for this new development. It is not our job to design it but to speak so accurately of what we want to see that the professionals can produce drawings, from which a contractor will build a building which we will bring to life through our work and the ways we inhabit the space.

What we are engaged in, in fact, is a work of incarnation. Of putting flesh on words. Translating our best hopes for Skainos into a real bricks and mortar building.

So we need to speak eloquently and lovingly of how we will enclose the space, or to put it in the words of an architect I heard recently, how we wrap ourselves in the earth. For most of human history, to build has been to use the materials drawn from the soil to envelope ourselves.

So we are engaged these days in incarnational conversations. And over the next three or four years we will see today’s conversations gradually being enfleshed. Our hopes, aspirations and dreams, our best intentions, which are but words today will take form and shape and flesh. All we have today are synapses of the brain firing in all directions, which  through the movement of air across vocal cords and the resulting vibrations produce a range of noises that are interpreted as speech, translated into lines on paper. Somehow all of this will result in a building. Amazing. Breath becomes flesh.

Words are powerful things you know.