'Ye Living Building': Spirit, Space, and Ritual Encounter in Shaker Architecture

This dissertation examines the origin of Shaker architecture and its dynamic interrelationship with theology and religious practice. The goal is an understanding of the spiritual genesis and ritual presence of Shaker building and design during the movement's formative decades. From obscurity during the Revolution the Shakers built 18 villages by the 1820s, constructing scores of buildings from Maine to Kentucky that embodied their ideals of order and utility as expressions of spiritual immanence. As the Shakers began defining themselves architecturally in the 1780s, theologically-based practices of ecstatic dance, celibacy, gender equality, common property, and separatist withdrawal had extraordinary architectural implications.;The key to Shaker society was millennial perfection, and it was a powerful idea. Meeting and dwelling houses were designed to meet their needs for a large unobstructed dance floor for worship and living spaces for extended "families" of celibate members. These structures expressed Shaker concepts of the duality and completion of God. For Shakers order was "heaven's first law." This orientation is readily identifiable in architectural patterns of centrality, symmetry, hierarchy, axiality, and boundary that suggest a conscious shaping of the village landscape in accordance with theological beliefs. Such manifestations of order symbolized an enveloping divine "presence," a kind of spiritual embellishment encoded throughout each village. Exposition of this iconography of the spirit reveals how architecture participated in community devotional life and suggests the village landscape functioned as a ritual matrix where the day to day was charged with spiritual implications at every turn.;This study of Shaker architecture explores the intersection of architecture and religion, bringing spirituality to the forefront. It demonstrates that principal Shaker buildings embodied and reinforced spiritual doctrine through explicit spatial hierarchies and collaborated with ritualized behaviors that aspired to enact the holy throughout Shaker life. As the Shakers moved through their buildings and landscapes in silent ordered processions, buildings and Believers participated in a richly collaborative process. And as spatial and spiritual dimensions merged village life offered participation in an ongoing liturgy of the everyday, expressing time and place as continuously transcendent.