The African American Church House: A Phenomenological Inquiry of an Afrocentric Sacred Space

Abstract

The institution of the black church in America is centered around two things: the people and their events. Very little scholarship has been documented about the physical buildings that became homes for the people and host to their events. These early church houses became the first evidence of a constructed material culture for formerly enslaved persons in America. The design and construction of black church houses provided enslaved as well as free persons of color the opportunity to physically create buildings that would become the center of African American life, beginning as early as the late 18th century and reaching to the present. Coupled with this exercise of the creation of architectural placemaking is the defining and application of the term “sacred space”.