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UEA Faith Centre
UEA Faith Centre
2019
In 2019, Brian Clarke developed the designs and model for a new faith centre to be added to the campus of the University of East Anglia in Norwich. This was conceived as a multi-faith facility, planned to accommodate both a mosque and a chapel, as well as one-to-one meeting rooms and individual prayer spaces. Situated at the heart of the campus, the design also envisions a student common area, creating a welcoming and integrated space for reflection, worship and community interaction.
The UEA Faith Centre project was designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, incorporating mosaics, metalwork, ceramics and full-height stained glass walls featuring geometric, vegetal and floral motifs. Clarke said of it:
“The whole nature of this building is about inclusivity. It will glow with light at night, it will be open 24/7. Even the accumulation of rainwater on this building is gathered in such a way that when light reflects off it, it will send ripples across the ceilings of the interior spaces.
A number of the spaces in this building are flanked by walls of transparent colour of stained glass. And that colour opens up to a full transparency so that the distant landscape around the university is drawn into the interior spaces and the composition. It draws the landscape into itself.
The art in this building is actually not hung on the walls or placed on the floors. It is the wall. It is the floor. It is the ceiling, expressed through ceramics, mosaics, stained glass, metalwork, and it celebrates the human sensitivity and the capacity we have as humans to look after each other. This building is about giving, not only to the university community, but about the on-going feeling that will follow students who’ve experienced it into the world they travel out into. It’s about well-being and it’s about the spirit of communal support.”
The project remains unrealised.