A reflection on the potential shapes of spiritual architecture. Freed from gravity, the walls explode gloriously toward the sky, lit from within by a cacophony of colour.
The VR Church began with a virtual reality meeting with Jeremy Nickel, a minister of the Unitarian Universalism Fellowship who conducts guided meditation sessions in VR. Rather than recreating the familiar forms of physical churches, the project asked a more fundamental question: what could spiritual architecture become when freed from gravity, material cost, and structural limitation?
Unitarian Universalism is a denomination that celebrates all religions, a universal spiritual space open to atheists, agnostics, and theists alike. This conceptual openness demanded an architecture equally unbounded. The result is a structure whose undulating walls surge skyward like flames or an explosion, blowing past the physical limitations that Gothic cathedrals could only mock with their soaring pinnacles.
Unlike traditional sacred architecture, which transforms light from the outside through stained glass, the VR Church inverts this relationship entirely. The structure is lit from inside, its undulating walls radiating colour outward. Inside the cave-like interior, different colours emanate from the walls, creating a cacophony of merging hues.
The facade is pierced throughout, providing the shell of a shelter while maintaining shifting visual connections between inside and outside. Light bleeds through the gaps, casting complex shadows that shift as the viewer moves through the space.
Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall.
The VR Church was modelled in VR using Google Blocks, one of Samuel’s earliest experiments with hand-sculpting architecture directly in virtual space. The project has not been released as a VR experience due to the complexity of completing the lighting process, but it stands as an important conceptual milestone: the first time the question of what virtual architecture should be, rather than what it could simulate, became the driving force of the design.
The project also marks the beginning of a trajectory that would lead from speculative spiritual architecture to the contemplative spaces of the Light Gallery and eventually to Gloam. That virtual architecture should exploit the freedoms of its medium rather than imitate physical constraints. This conviction runs through every project that followed.
