Julia Solis: Leap of Faith |
It failed in its first incarnation, as a church. It failed in its second as a library. Now in its third stage - a ruin - the building has found its calling. While the walls are crumbling, the structure is doing a nice job of preserving the strangeness of cramming a place of secular learning into one of spiritual faith, with all that hard-edged knowledge scraping against the sweeping embrace of the church. Now, instead of confession booths, there are claustrophobic study cells, the hymn sheets are replaced by peeling index cards. Artifacts of a desire for betterment, equally useless in the face of a collapsing roof and rampant mold.