Architect Seeking Out the Sacred Symbolism in Secular Structures : Spirituality: Author Anthony Lawlor, who has written a book on finding the inspirational in everyday buildings, takes a tour of Downtown L.A. Along the way, he finds City Hall, freeway overpasses and office towers uplifting.

It was a muggy fall morning in Downtown Los Angeles and the people streaming up the steps of City Hall seemed preoccupied with such mundane business as zoning variances, traffic regulation and building codes.

But Anthony Lawlor, who was driving south on Spring Street, was preoccupied with spirituality. “Notice how the basic rising form of City Hall is like a secular steeple,” he said as the car turned onto Temple Street. “And at the top of the steps, the pillars and arches invite you in, to a spacious rotunda inscribed with zodiac signs. This is more than a city building. It can be very uplifting for people going to work there or just walking by.”

Lawlor, an architect, was conducting a spiritual tour of Downtown Los Angeles, focusing not on churches, but on office buildings, pedestrian walkways and multilayered freeway interchanges.

These structures, he says, are more than just functional. They can be nurturing reminders of the spiritual essence of life, helping to point out an individual’s connectedness to all things--mind to body, human beings to nature--connections that have been severely split in the 20th Century, he says. “People today feel fragmented and isolated.”

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A cathedral or synagogue or mosque is designed specifically to restore a sense of the sacred, he says, and people go there seeking personal wholeness. But such design secrets can also be found in many secular buildings, if one learns to stop and look for them. “These buildings are speaking to us,” said Lawlor as the Downtown drive continued. “The City Hall, with its unifying elements, reminds us that we can be interconnected.”

He was in Los Angeles to promote his new book, “The Temple in the House: Finding the Sacred in Everyday Architecture.” He calls it a guide to enriching our lives through architecture. “I think we can perceive the buildings around us in ways I call sacred.”

“Behind the physical, material world,” he writes, “there is some force that animates our bodies. That life force--whether we call it God, spirit or energy--that’s what I call the sacred.”

His illustrated book combines religion, mythology, philosophy and architecture, from ancient times to the present, to present its theme of healing through architecture. Lawlor maintains that people ignore architecture’s potential to unify mind, body and health to their own detriment.

“From the moment we are born, to the moment we pass away, we are in some sort of building. Many people today feel numbed by modern life. If they can see these connecting threads, they can see their interconnected-ness with all things.”

This is a theme Lawlor has long been contemplating.

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He grew up in Los Angeles, graduated from Hamilton High School and received his master of arts degree from UC Berkeley. “My family was culturally Jewish, but not religious,” he says. “Perhaps that is why I’ve chosen this focus. As I began to travel around the world after college, I started to notice how buildings influenced me.”

A pivotal experience was his first visit to Chartres Cathedral in France when he was 29.

“I knew it was a great piece of architecture, but what I learned is why it’s an architectural treasure,” he said. From his first glimpse of the spires rising out of the medieval city, to the cathedral entrance, past the carvings of saints to the soaring arches of the interior and the light-flooded rose window, he recalls, “Everything pointed to a spiritual experience, taking your spirit upward. Going up to that doorway, I felt almost a hum of consciousness: There had been years and years of worship there. It sounds metaphysical, but I felt the expansion of my inner awareness.”

Since then, his thinking has been further shaped by such modern holistic architects as Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn (“He really saw the spirit in architecture”) and Joseph Campbell’s studies of the myth and symbols representing fundamental patterns of thinking. And most important, Lawlor said, “I’ve been practicing transcendental meditation for 23 years. It gave me direct experience of the depths of my own consciousness. So then I could make the connections between inner consciousness and outer form.”

Sifting together all those influences, he began to look at the buildings around him in a different way. “Spiritual architecture is not solely the province of religious structures dedicated to particular rituals and occasions,” he wrote. “It can be created where the physical surroundings are shaped to give our lives depth and meaning.”

He devotes several chapters to illustrating how various thought patterns--what Campbell calls “mythic archetypes”--are revealed in specific architectural elements such as a steeple or a doorway.

For instance, he says, the fundamental pattern in human thought, which is “desire, seek and find,” happens thousands of times a day for everyone. “You can see this pattern clearly in a cathedral, represented by the portal, the central aisle and the altar,” he says. “But it’s also expressed in a supermarket or a department store.” In each case, he says, an architectural principal molds a building into patterns that integrate mind and surroundings.

And such basic instincts as the aspiration for “more” in life can be seen not only in the pointed arches of a Gothic cathedral but also in the pitched gables of a Victorian house or the soaring silhouette of a Downtown high-rise. Recognizing these elements, he says, can be a renewing experience.

That was the thesis he was illustrating on his guided tour of the “public temples” of Downtown Los Angeles, in which he pointed out various buildings that met the test of “reference points for the soul.”

Not all were monumental. The little commercial kiosks flanking the Los Angeles Street entrance to City Hall East can be soothing to the spirit, he said, with their pagoda-style roofs recalling a Japanese temple. “I feel this has some effect on our philosophy. It is harmonizing. It takes our attention away from Earth’s clutter.”

The Los Angeles Public Library can be experienced as a “real temple to knowledge,” with its double stairstep profile symbolizing a “world mountain, with diversity rising to unity.” And at the Department of Water and Power, a sculpture that appears to be sailing on the surface of a shimmering pool is “very spiritual,” he said, while the layered building itself with its stylized columns “looks like a stripped-down version of the Colosseum in Rome.”

Lawlor, who has won many awards for his designs, left a large San Francisco firm to set up his own small practice in Fairfield, Iowa, because he wanted to work with people on an individual basis. “In my architectural practice and the design classes I teach,” he says, “I find that many people want to extend the search for sacredness to their homes and workplaces.

“Our home can be just a place where we stop off, throw in some food and rest,” he said. “Or we can create a little nurturing spot where all aspects of ourselves are addressed.” His firm builds custom homes and commercial projects. “We just did a small office building with a central atrium fountain and garden. Those elements transform a box filled with little rooms to a community where people can hang out.”

He started working on the book three years ago as an attempt to clarify his own direction. “I do have this spiritual interest, as well as architectural knowledge,” he said. “There are lots of books on architecture and lots on various forms of spirituality, but I didn’t see anything that combined the two.”

His Los Angeles appearances included the “Cityscape” segment of KPCC FM’s “Airtalk” with host Larry Mantle and design critic Sam Hall Kaplan.

“The book is important because it reminds architects they are creating spaces to meet the needs of people and not serve their own egos,” Kaplan said. He agrees with Lawlor’s thesis that contemporary architecture has become disconnected from its spiritual history. “The more people are aware of what architects should be doing to enhance their lives, the more demanding they can be,” he said.

“The Temple in the House,” written for a general audience, is designed as an elegant “how-to” handbook. Each chapter ends with reader exercises for enlarging one’s vision of everyday streets and buildings, and for designing various sacred places within one’s own home.

Lawlor says his readers have no trouble “getting it.”

“This is something we all share--we live with buildings. Life can’t be whole unless it encompasses mind, body and environment, and what I’m doing is giving people a language to understand the connections. Just by reading it, you are putting on glasses for seeing in a new way.”