In homage to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and in response to a densely urban, secular context, sacred landscape is a parish church for the inner city: a space for emotional and spiritual catharsis.

The divine is conflated with the natural, and thus in the architecture religious belief is articulated in ecological terms. The wildflower nursery is subordinate to the church in the program, coexisting as a medium in which Catholic ritual may occur. The church inculturates and adapts pre-Christian and indigenous beliefs around kinship to land into a Catholic context. The omnipresence of nature, and thus the divine, is reflected in the overlapping, merging functions of space.

The architectural strategy is summarised as a triptych of metaphors. Ascent is the first, where in the free section and materiality, bottom to top, there are transitions from secular to sacred, dark to light. An increasingly reverent atmosphere is generated from the changes in quality – materiality shifting from concrete, to rammed earth and then to timber.

Second, the building promotes ‘growth’ of not only wildflowers but of the human soul. The increasing exposure to light towards the top allows the sacred spaces to be more conducive to gardening and cultivation, leading worshippers to associate their encounter with God to nature.

Last, the ancient traditions of ‘procession’ are invoked in the circulation, where circulating, winding stairs funnel believers to the sanctuary. In this procession, much like the terrace-climbing sinners of Mount Purgatorio, believers are first gathered, then go through floors of preparation before finally embracing the divine.