top: St. John the Baptist, Ukrainian Catholic Church, 1947, Lamont, Alberta
bottom: St. John the Baptist, Ukrainian Catholic Church, 1939, Borschiw, Alberta
Both the Ukrainian Catholic St. John the Bap- tist churches have a traditional cupolas. The town of Lamont and the rural area of Borschiw were settled by immigrants from the area of Galicia in the Ukraine. The first wave of Ukrai- nian immigrants started in 1891 and continued to both regions until the late 1940’s. The Catholic Church at Borschiw has a relationship with both the sky and the ground plane. It is the second church constructed at this site, the original is now the parish hall. This ability to relocate the congregation speaks of the temporary nature often associated with prairie architecture. Both the church at Lamont and Borschiw are raised above the ground which give them the appearance of being detached from the land, closer to heaven.
fully aware of the significance of the church with its dual symbolic role — a physical structure within the landscape and its spiritual signifi- cance in their lives — especially so in a much less secularised society where the church played a dynamic and perhaps almost omnipresent role in the life of these new immigrant settlers. When one considers that these immigrants usually built these churches themselves, with local building materials that were often donated, these structures really represented a form of architecture built as a labour of love. Often, they were smaller scale replicas of churches in the immigrants’ country of origin and would have had added significance as a source of nostalgia for their home. 2 Since these church structures were, and still are, visible from long distances they are silent reminders of a spiritual reality that still persists.
In Byzantine thought cupolas represent the ‘vaults of heaven’. They exist as a threshold between earth represented by the nave and the sky which represents heaven. It is commonly thought that the dome or cupola finds its origin in the spire — spires differ though in that they pierce the sky (or heaven) not unlike prayer, while cupolas embrace the sky and the nave as well. 3 In this sense the church structures are in the world but not of the world, having both temporal and transcenden- tal qualities and attributes. It is the architectural attributes of spires and cupolas, especially when viewed under atmospheric skies, that lend themselves so aptly to describing an architecture of the great-in- between. Spires represent an alpha form while cupolas represent an omega form symbolically representative of Jesus Christ, the alpha and omega of Christian faith. This is especially apparent since domes and spires almost without exception are surmounted by a cross.
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architecture and land
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